5 ms·

> the narrative that performance and efficiency don't matter That was the case during the 90s and the first decade of the 2000. Just wait for Moore's Law to k

> the narrative that performance and efficiency don't matter That was the case during the 90s and the first decade of the 2000. Just wait for Moore's Law to kick in and in 18 months your code will get faster by an order of magnitude for free.

DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
Moore's Law concerns IC transistor counts, not actual overall performance, and especially not single-threaded performance: a 40-core CPU isn't going to make Windows twice as fast as a 20-core CPU. Single-threaded performance has long-since effectively plateaued: it's 2023 now and a desktop computer built 10 years ago (2013) can run Windows 11 just fine (ignoring the TPM thing) - but compare that to using a computer from 2003 in 2013 (where it'd run, but poorly), or a computer from 1993 in 2003 (which simply wouldn't work at all). This is not to say that there won't be any significant performance gains to come, such as with rethinks in hardware (e.g. adding actual RAM into a desktop CPU package, non-volatile memory, etc) but I struggle to see how typical x86 MOV,CMP,JMP instructions could be executed sequentially any faster than they are right now.
- frankreyes 4y ago
  Real-world evidence says otherwise https://stoneridgetechnology.com/company/blog/the-exponential-growth-of-hardware-and-the-linear-growth-of-software/ https://stoneridgetechnology.com/company/blog/the-exponentia...
  - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    That article doesn't contradict my post, in fact it's basically the same thing I'm saying: look at fig2 (the timeline graphic) and the paragraph preceding it: it shows that the gains in "serial" HPC performance gave-way to massively-parallel gains sometime around 2010. The rest of the article is concerned with how software today is still written for those "serial" processors in-mind and fails to take advantage of parallel computing hardware - but this is hardly a new nor controversial statement.
    - frankreyes 4y ago
      You started your post saying that there's no correlation between transistors and performance. First graph shows that is wrong. My argument was simple: 20 years ago nobody cared about performance because of the strong correlation between Moore Law and MFLOPS and performance in general. Nowadays with multicore, individual CPU cores are becoming slower, not faster. Then we can't just wait 18 months for individual cores to get faster. Today we need to write better software.
      - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
        > You started your post saying that there's no correlation between transistors and performance. No, that's not what I said: I'm saying that single-threaded performance is no-longer directly (let alone linearly) correlated with transistor count, and hasn't been for decades - but it's single-threaded performance that matters for most end-user applications on peoples' computers/smartphones/etc. And Moore's Law makes no claims about performance increases either, only transistor density. It's literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article: > Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. The link to performance (any kind of performance: parallel or serial) was made incorrectly by another Intel executive, David House, but that assumption simply isn't true. To summarize: *yes*: bleeding-edge IC transistor density generally doubles every 18-24 months, but this does not translate into any kind of performance-doubling in end-user applications. In fact, on the contrary, perceived "performance" (however you define it) outside of parallelizable programs, has demonstrably stagnated.

DaiPlusPlus 4y ago

Moore's Law concerns IC transistor counts, not actual overall performance, and especially not single-threaded performance: a 40-core CPU isn't going to make Windows twice as fast as a 20-core CPU. Single-threaded performance has long-since effectively plateaued: it's 2023 now and a desktop computer built 10 years ago (2013) can run Windows 11 just fine (ignoring the TPM thing) - but compare that to using a computer from 2003 in 2013 (where it'd run, but poorly), or a computer from 1993 in 2003 (which simply wouldn't work at all). This is not to say that there won't be any significant performance gains to come, such as with rethinks in hardware (e.g. adding actual RAM into a desktop CPU package, non-volatile memory, etc) but I struggle to see how typical x86 MOV,CMP,JMP instructions could be executed sequentially any faster than they are right now.

frankreyes 4y ago
Real-world evidence says otherwise https://stoneridgetechnology.com/company/blog/the-exponential-growth-of-hardware-and-the-linear-growth-of-software/ https://stoneridgetechnology.com/company/blog/the-exponentia...
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  That article doesn't contradict my post, in fact it's basically the same thing I'm saying: look at fig2 (the timeline graphic) and the paragraph preceding it: it shows that the gains in "serial" HPC performance gave-way to massively-parallel gains sometime around 2010. The rest of the article is concerned with how software today is still written for those "serial" processors in-mind and fails to take advantage of parallel computing hardware - but this is hardly a new nor controversial statement.
  - frankreyes 4y ago
    You started your post saying that there's no correlation between transistors and performance. First graph shows that is wrong. My argument was simple: 20 years ago nobody cared about performance because of the strong correlation between Moore Law and MFLOPS and performance in general. Nowadays with multicore, individual CPU cores are becoming slower, not faster. Then we can't just wait 18 months for individual cores to get faster. Today we need to write better software.
    - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
      > You started your post saying that there's no correlation between transistors and performance. No, that's not what I said: I'm saying that single-threaded performance is no-longer directly (let alone linearly) correlated with transistor count, and hasn't been for decades - but it's single-threaded performance that matters for most end-user applications on peoples' computers/smartphones/etc. And Moore's Law makes no claims about performance increases either, only transistor density. It's literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article: > Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. The link to performance (any kind of performance: parallel or serial) was made incorrectly by another Intel executive, David House, but that assumption simply isn't true. To summarize: *yes*: bleeding-edge IC transistor density generally doubles every 18-24 months, but this does not translate into any kind of performance-doubling in end-user applications. In fact, on the contrary, perceived "performance" (however you define it) outside of parallelizable programs, has demonstrably stagnated.