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From the article -- "Unfortunately, there’s been a trend of uneven performance across cores as manufacturers try to make their chips best at everything, and use

From the article -- "Unfortunately, there’s been a trend of uneven performance across cores as manufacturers try to make their chips best at everything, and use different core setups to cover more bases." I don't find this unfortunate. Engineering is compromise and being able to make things that do a particular thing well can get you more performance per $ and per watt than you might otherwise see. The whole GPU thing that kneecapped Intel[1] is an example I use of how a compute element optimized for one thing can boost overall system performance. I have worked on a number of bits of code for "big/little" ARM chips and while it does make scheduling more complex, overall we've been able to deliver more capability per $ and per watt. That is perhaps more important in portable systems but it works in data centers too. I had an interesting discussion inside Google about storage and whether or not using a full up motherboard for GFS nodes was ideal. The prevailing argument at the time was uniformity of "nodes" meant everything was software, nodes could be swapped at will and you could write software to do what ever you needed. But when it comes to efficiency, which is to say what percentage of available resource is used to deliver the services, you found a lost of wasted watts/cpu cycles. All depends on what part of the engineering design space you are trying to optimize. [1] The "kneecapped" situation is that since the PC/AT (80286) on, Intel generally made the most margin of all the chips that went into a complete system. Now that it is often NVIDIA.

usrusr 4y ago
Unfortunate in how it demonstrates that there don't seem to be any lower-hanging fruit left. Actually it doesn't so much feel like picking higher hanging fruit, it feels like stretching hard for the last withered leaves, long after the last fruit have disappeared.
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  Yeah pretty much. There was never any real expectation that Moore's observation would result in infinitely improving compute performance, and Intel famously demonstrated that reality was much closer to Jim Gray's "smoking hairy golf ball" future. [1] "Jim: Here it is. The concept is that the speed of light is finite and a nanosecond is a foot. So if you buy a gigahertz processor, it’s doing something every nanosecond. That’s the event horizon. But that’s in a vacuum, the processor is not a vacuum, and signals don’t go in a straight line and the processor is running at 3 gigahertz. So you don’t have a foot. You’ve got four inches. And the speed of light in a solid is less than that. So this is the event horizon. If something happens on one side of this thing, the clock is going to tick before to the signal gets to the other side. That’s why processors of the future have to be small and in fact golf ball– size. Why are they smoking? Well, because they have to run on a lot of electricity. The way you get things to go fast is you put a lot of power into them. So heat dissipation is a big problem. Now it’s astonishing to me that Intel has decided that this is a big problem only recently, because people knew that we were headed towards this heat cliff a long time ago. And why is it hairy? Because you’ve got to get signals in and out of it, so this thing is going to be wrapped in pins." -- https://amturing.acm.org/pdf/GrayTuringTranscript.pdf https://amturing.acm.org/pdf/GrayTuringTranscript.pdf
  - ksec 4y ago
    I often use the speed of light and nanoseconds as an example of we cant have infinite performance. But that was back to at best 2013. But this goes back to 1998. I just wish I had this quote known earlier. We are now definitely near the end of the S curve. May be Another 10 years of node advance and small incremental IPC progress. I often wonder, what's next. Or are we... nearly done and its all software?
    - Nekhrimah 4y ago
      > nearly done With silicon based physical chips, I imagine this is true. I would guess, like some speculative science fiction, that the next leap in performance would be an entirely new concept. Who knows what is possible?
    - chmod775 4y ago
      We still got one unused dimension. We're not done until our chips are cubes or even spheres.
      - dgacmu 4y ago
        It's a lot harder to get the heat out. It's why we stack things like dram (HBM) or sram (AMD v-cache), and intensively used 3d in flash, but not yet heavy duty processing. The more we go 3d on compute we have to cut ghz even more to reduce power, and that puts more burden on the programmer. Which we'll probably do some day.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

usrusr 4y ago

Unfortunate in how it demonstrates that there don't seem to be any lower-hanging fruit left. Actually it doesn't so much feel like picking higher hanging fruit, it feels like stretching hard for the last withered leaves, long after the last fruit have disappeared.

ChuckMcM 4y ago
Yeah pretty much. There was never any real expectation that Moore's observation would result in infinitely improving compute performance, and Intel famously demonstrated that reality was much closer to Jim Gray's "smoking hairy golf ball" future. [1] "Jim: Here it is. The concept is that the speed of light is finite and a nanosecond is a foot. So if you buy a gigahertz processor, it’s doing something every nanosecond. That’s the event horizon. But that’s in a vacuum, the processor is not a vacuum, and signals don’t go in a straight line and the processor is running at 3 gigahertz. So you don’t have a foot. You’ve got four inches. And the speed of light in a solid is less than that. So this is the event horizon. If something happens on one side of this thing, the clock is going to tick before to the signal gets to the other side. That’s why processors of the future have to be small and in fact golf ball– size. Why are they smoking? Well, because they have to run on a lot of electricity. The way you get things to go fast is you put a lot of power into them. So heat dissipation is a big problem. Now it’s astonishing to me that Intel has decided that this is a big problem only recently, because people knew that we were headed towards this heat cliff a long time ago. And why is it hairy? Because you’ve got to get signals in and out of it, so this thing is going to be wrapped in pins." -- https://amturing.acm.org/pdf/GrayTuringTranscript.pdf https://amturing.acm.org/pdf/GrayTuringTranscript.pdf
- ksec 4y ago
  I often use the speed of light and nanoseconds as an example of we cant have infinite performance. But that was back to at best 2013. But this goes back to 1998. I just wish I had this quote known earlier. We are now definitely near the end of the S curve. May be Another 10 years of node advance and small incremental IPC progress. I often wonder, what's next. Or are we... nearly done and its all software?
  - Nekhrimah 4y ago
    > nearly done With silicon based physical chips, I imagine this is true. I would guess, like some speculative science fiction, that the next leap in performance would be an entirely new concept. Who knows what is possible?
  - chmod775 4y ago
    We still got one unused dimension. We're not done until our chips are cubes or even spheres.
    - dgacmu 4y ago
      It's a lot harder to get the heat out. It's why we stack things like dram (HBM) or sram (AMD v-cache), and intensively used 3d in flash, but not yet heavy duty processing. The more we go 3d on compute we have to cut ghz even more to reduce power, and that puts more burden on the programmer. Which we'll probably do some day.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]