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The Great CPU Stagnation

• kayson 3y ago
  We've known about this for a long time. Everyone expected it to happen. There are some key upcoming technologies that have the potential to cause a step in scaling (CFETs, backside power delivery) but it's still not going to be anywhere near Moore's law levels. I think this is part of why GPU power is skyrocketing and why Apple, Qualcomm, and the like are trying to shift towards services.
  • Reason077 3y ago
    It helps that those services are a great recurring revenue stream, too.
  • moffkalast 3y ago
    Well the main problem is resistance isn't it? Most of the power "used" is to get electrons to flow fast enough for the logic gates to settle for a specific clock frequency and the resistive losses to heat. The only real way forward that isn't a temporary workaround seems finding a new type of semiconductor that has lower overall resistance than silicon. Whoever figures out how to dope graphene and produce wafers without defects will probably make trillions.
    • timerol 3y ago
      tl;dr New materials can help, but "resistive losses" aren't really the driving factor. The energy is a mix of leakage current and active current. Leakage current can be thought of as resistance - it's how much current flows through a transistor that's off. This can be better based on the material, but gets harder with smaller transistors. (Thinking about quantum tunneling as a resistance is good to get intuition, but not good enough to help solve the problem. A material with a lower bulk resistivity will not help here.) Active current is based on capacitance. Each FET has a little capacitor that needs to be charged and discharged every time the logic is switched - that adds up. Lowering the capacitance of each FET would reduce the energy required to switch it, but generally comes with bad tradeoffs. High-k dielectrics increase the capacitance, all other things being equal. But all other things are not equal, and they are used to create better performing FETs with lower power leakage.
      • saltcured 3y ago
        I thought leakage current would be the "DC" loss that is independent of frequency, like we had in old bipolar logic. Isn't it fair to characterize the cmos/fet switching losses as resistance to moving the charges around? I understand leakage will go up if we increase voltages to support higher switching speeds, but aren't there still a lot of losses that happen with logic transitions and reduce when the states are stable, even if voltages are held constant? I realize it we can't move charges around for free, but in some fantasy superconducting-fet logic circuit, wouldn't the power consumption be reduced? I.e. much of the waste is resistive losses while charging and discharging those gates.
        • timerol 3y ago
          > Isn't it fair to characterize the cmos/fet switching losses as resistance to moving the charges around? Not really. It makes more sense to think about it as filling and emptying capacitors. You are charging the gate capacitance up to the supply voltage, then dumping that charge to discharge the gate to 0 again. The energy of each capacitance that gets charged and dumped is CV^2/2, which happens for each logic transition. > I realize it we can't move charges around for free, but in some fantasy superconducting-fet logic circuit, wouldn't the power consumption be reduced? If there was no resistance when distributing charge, it would help a bit, but not enough to change the clock frequency by more than 20%, assuming that the fantasy superconducting-fet had normal leakage and gate capacitance.
          • saltcured 3y ago
            So the charge is work and the discharge is waste? I guess I am entertaining the idea of an idealized Maxwell-demon CMOS circuit, if we could bounce the charge between gates with very little work to just pump the charge back and forth.
            • timerol 3y ago
              That's a reasonable way to think about it - you take energy from the supply voltage to charge the gate capacitor when the logic line goes high, then dump it when the logic line goes low. If you had a lossless bidirectional voltage converter circuit for each gate capacitance, then you could charge the capacitor from the supply and discharge it back into the supply, removing any switching losses.
    • LordDragonfang 3y ago
      When talking about resistance and materials, it's also important to note that silicon has relatively low optimal operating temperatures compared to some of the other semiconductors available. This limits the amount of voltage you can pump into it (because the resistance mean higher V leads to heat), and voltage correlates with clock frequency. GaN has already seen success in chargers, and silicon carbide is another promising material. We can't achieve the low level of defects needed for small process nodes yet, though. Disclaimer: I'm not a material scientist, so this is probably only partly correct.
  • Yoric 3y ago
    Well, and photonics, quantum computing, etc. But they're not there yet.
  • qayxc 3y ago
    > I think this is part of why GPU power is skyrocketing and why Apple, Qualcomm, and the like are trying to shift towards services. IMHO it's only a very small part of why GPU power consumption is going up. The main reason is the completely unnecessary chase for the performance crown. From personal testing: my GPU manages to get 95% of its peak performance while being power limited to 80%. So the in order to squeeze the last 5% of performance out of the device, 20% more power is pushed through it. It stays above 99% peak performance while being power limited to ~87%. But even just looking at the raw numbers paints a different picture. About 12 years ago, a high-end GPU (e.g. GTX 480) had a power draw of 250W at a theoretical peak FP32 performance of 1,345 GFLOPS. This year's RTX 4070 has a theoretical peak performance of 29.15 TFOPS at 200W, so we went from 5.38 GFLOPS/W to 145.75 GFLOPS/W in 12 years - a 27x improvement in efficiency and a ~22x improvement in raw performance. Now let's compare that to the numbers from a decade ago: a GTX 580 from 2010 had a power rating of 244W at 49.41 GTexel/s. A Geforce2 Ultra from 2000 used about 10W at 2.0 GTexel/s. So we went from 0.2 GTexel/s/W to - you've guessed it - 0.2 GTexel/s/W, so same efficiency with a ~27x increase in performance over a decade, though the efficiency is only a guess, since neither GFLOPS nor official power draw figures are readily available for 2000-era hardware. Fast forward a few years so we can get reliable power draw numbers and comparable performance in GFLOPS, we have the high end GeForce 8800 GTX at 155W for 345.6 GFLOPS in 2006. Ten years later, the comparable model would have been the GTX 1080 from 2016 with 180W at 8.873 TFLOPS. So 2.2 GFLOPS/W versus 49.3 GFLOPS/W or a 22x increase in efficiency and a ~26x increase in performance over the course of a decade. So during the past 23 years, power efficiency steadily improved, while raw performance increase also showed no signs of slow down in the GPU space. This is given the same generous time frames, to account for the occasional generational leap.
    • pixl97 3y ago
      I would also think that GPU workloads have something to do with it. Almost none are serial workflows, and instead highly parallel work. GPU workloads will eventually run into the same scaling limits. That is we will be unable to speed up each execution unit any further, or the primary work we give the GPU will not be able to be split into more threads and accomplish useful work.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Kon-Peki 3y ago
    > We've known about this for a long time. Everyone expected it to happen. Absolutely. The 2006 "A View from Berkeley" is still a great paper [1]. And we still have a long ways to go on this recommendation: > To maximize application efficiency, programming models should support a wide range of data types and successful models of parallelism We are still stuck in the winner-take-all mindset when it comes to software development. [1] https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-183.html https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-...
  • Animats 3y ago
    > GPU power is skyrocketing Not quite. NVidia's entry level price/performance has not improved much since 2016. What's skyrocketing is the price of the top of the line models.
    • NovaDudely 3y ago
      When the Voodoo 2 card launched it was $299. Adjusted for inflation that would be about $550. The latest 4090RTX is RRP of $1599. High end is now becoming a case of throwing us much money at the problem as possible.
• AbsoluteCabbage 3y ago
  At least now people will start to focus on how bloated and slow software has become in the meantime. And stop referring to it as “tech”.
  • freedomben 3y ago
    I (unfortunately) doubt it. I think the reality with our current situation is that only hobbyists and open source people care enough about that to do anything about it. Everyone else is doing Scrum so hard that they can't think of much outside the current sprint, and any "pre-mature optimization" is evil and must be avoided. The result will be more of the same bloat. Competition won't help because everybody is using the same bloated foundations and nobody will invest more than a few days in the foundation because it's not "product work." The best we can hope for I think is that open source will create frameworks/foundations on top of which people can then try to build. Elixir Phoenix has been that to some extent, basically taking the rails philosophy but making it super light and fast (my Phoenix APIs run with 40MiB of memory and response times ~1ms). Maybe those sorts of advancements can save us, but I can't think of a way to address the browser that way and realistically right now the browser is a huge area of the bloat. A ton of code that runs in the browser is terribly optimized, but even the base is quite big.
    • f6v 3y ago
      > Everyone else is doing Scrum so hard that they can't think of much outside the current sprint This is a gross oversimplification. While there’re inefficiencies and process abuses, this doesn’t mean nobody cares about speed and resources. It might look that way to purists who’re focused only on tech part of the businesses.
    • jvanderbot 3y ago
      That's exponential era practices. But we're hitting the top of the S curve. Believing that exponential era practices will continue indefinitely into the coming linear/level era is as naive as believing exponential growth continues forever. The real question is what happens first: change in software to adapt to slow growing compute or change in architecture to revitalize Moore's law.
• Reason077 3y ago
  The Great x86 CPU Stagnation? ARM seems to have made some great leaps forward in recent years.
  • rbanffy 3y ago
    I don't have a feeling ARM offerings are significantly cheaper than x86. There really isn't much magic, a transistor costs the same to manufacture under a given process, regardless of the ISA. In that, RISC-V might get some edge, because ARM licensing is expensive, but I don't think licensing is a significant cost for the x86 crowd. OTOH, the server ARM people are really pushing it: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/sound-the-siyrn-ampereone-192-core https://www.semianalysis.com/p/sound-the-siyrn-ampereone-192... But Altra's ain't cheap.
  • freedomben 3y ago
    not really, there have been some systems built on top of ARM chips that have been impressive, but the chip hardware tech hasn't changed much differently than their x86 counterparts
  • f6v 3y ago
    I’m ignorant about this. Can a Qualcomm or Samsung chip match Intel’s raw power?
    • mhh__ 3y ago
      The leading Arm chip (by apple) is arguably the best in class.
      • f6v 3y ago
        I'm well aware of Apple’s success since I’m surrounded by their devices at home. It seems to me it can’t be attributed only to ARM. What I wonder is where’re someone can match Intel on Intel’s playing field, like supplying ARM chips to laptop manufacturers that are better than Intel.
        • 3y ago
• tambourine_man 3y ago
  Google cache version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FBaO-jB1F6gJ:databasearchitects.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-great-cpu-stagnation.html&client=safari&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FBaO-jB...
• IMSAI8080 3y ago
  The answer to this might be more application specific accelerators and 3D stacking. You can't afford to have all of a chip switched on at once because of the power consumption and dissipation, so you build more optimised accelerators and keep flipping between them as you encounter different pieces of code that may benefit from each accelerator. Only a fraction of the device is ever in use at once. You 3D stack the chips to get more transistors in the same space. NAND flash chips are already 3D stacked, often with 100 layers or more.
  • senkora 3y ago
    The industry term for the idea that most of your chip is switched off at any given time is “dark silicon”.
    • kzrdude 3y ago
      What about silicon that's perpetually switched off because of defects and binning (Like apple's 7 core graphics offerings and so on), that's an even darker silicon?
  • bee_rider 3y ago
    It would be cool if chiplets got to the point where, at least, an OEM… someone Dell sized… could actually differentiate themselves by mix-and-matching a group of accelerators. Bringing back consumer-visible differentiation in CPUs (other than Apple against the world) would be nice for the market I think.
• williamkuszmaul 3y ago
  Related recent paper in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aam9744 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aam9744
• mhh__ 3y ago
  IPC data seems a bit sus
  • formerly_proven 3y ago
    It's the average IPC improvement from the AMD marketing slides - Zen 2 over Zen, 15%, Zen 3 over Zen 2, 19% and Zen 4 over Zen 3 at 13%, so Zen 3 over Zen is 37% and Zen 4 over Zen is 55% (maybe a typo in the article)
    • jeffbee 3y ago
      Zen 1 was terrible and is not a useful baseline. It was obsolete at launch. Nobody bought them except companies who were paid to take them and agree to be in a press release. It was literally half the speed of Skylake on server workloads.
      • phkahler 3y ago
        >> Zen 1 was terrible and is not a useful baseline. First off, it's a perfect baseline when comparing AMD chips since that time. Zen 1 was similar to Intel performance-wise, winning some benchmarks and losing some. Second, the Raven Ridge (Zen 1+) APUs were IMHO excellent performance for the price at the time - even against Intel. I have not felt the need to build a new system since the Mellori_ITX: https://github.com/phkahler/mellori_ITX https://github.com/phkahler/mellori_ITX
      • ahartmetz 3y ago
        Zen 1 was slightly slower per core, but had twice the amount of cores that Intel was willing to sell for desktop platforms! Kind of a big deal for use cases such as compiling C++ code...
  • crote 3y ago
    Even worse: IPC data is pretty much useless when it comes to comparing CPU performance! How is it going to account for something like the introduction of AVX512, doubling the data throughput per instruction? What about increased cache greatly reducing the number of instructions waiting for memory access, or a faster memory controller? How would you even begin to quantify a new PCIe generation doubling SSD bandwidth, or a better core interconnect reducing NUMA penalties? IPC is basically just a marketing number with today's CPUs. If you want to get a proper comparison, use a real-world benchmark.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• cl0ckt0wer 3y ago
  The cores/money comparison doesn't looks like it accounts for inflation.
  • huijzer 3y ago
    Indeed. I was also wondering why people would buy newer chips if they don’t show performance increases per dollar.
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      I think the main reason people get a new CPU, regardless of the performance, is because the device that it came in has gotten too old (wear-and tear: screen, batteries, etc).
      • rbanffy 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure that when you adjust for inflation, you get more performance per dollar, but I'd need to do math and I don't have the numbers from my head. Does Google Sheets provide a "inflation-adjusted dollar" function?
        • trashtester 3y ago
          Performace/$ is still going down when adjusting for inflation. Performance/W goes down even more.
        • bee_rider 3y ago
          I’m not sure really. But anyway, I’m not sure if it makes sense to expect performance/$ to always increase anyway. I mean, I know this started out by talking about multicore, but think about single threaded performance. They’ve already grabbed all the low hanging fruit, the challenge now is finding increasingly hard to hunt down tweaks… a small improvement might require massive engineering effort.
          • rbanffy 3y ago
• frozenport 3y ago
  Compute power continues to increase as evidenced by faster accelerators/gpus and top500 flop counts.
• formerly_proven 3y ago
  > Regrettably, when considering cost per core, this impressive trend appears to have stalled, ushering in an era of CPU stagnation. In this case, don't let the author see $/GFLOPS for the last 10 years of GPUs!
  • cubefox 3y ago
    Exactly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35995402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35995402
• sremani 3y ago
  This has to be coupled with 'The Great Software Decay'. I hope we will have 'real' innovation in Software Engineering where people take writing performant code seriously and many Software Engineers actually know what a compiler does and what the CPU does etc. The frameworks have been helpful but at the same time -- rounding buttons is not software engineering.
  • qayxc 3y ago
    The problem is that many algorithms simply cannot be parallelised well and that ever since the 90s the iron is cheap whereas the programmer's time is expensive. So instead of spending weeks or even months on trying to squeeze the last bit of performance out of an application that's "good enough" performance-wise, developers can use that time to roll out features or fix bugs instead, i.e. generating value for their customers. It's simply a question of economics.
• lynx23 3y ago
  The perfect time to shed ourselves of the idea that "optimisation is a waste of dev-time". Mobile computing was the last godsent t actually rethink performance a little bit, but we still have a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit. I sometimes dream about a month-of-no-new-features, where everyone would just have a bit of time to clean up and improve on existing stuff.
  • danielvaughn 3y ago
    More like a year - the performance rot runs deep.
    • MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Considering that the NeXTStep OS ran on a 1120 × 832, 12 bit, display in 1990 with 12 MB of archaic memory and 1.5 MB of VRAM, I'd say more then a year. Judging by modern app memory usage. Even with the latest and greatest 4k, HDR, wide colour, display, no app should ideally use more then 256 MB of memory by those standards, unless it's even more complex.
      • Arrath 3y ago
        Recently watching a Gamer's Nexus video where they tested a new built Voodoo 6 5000, I was impressed watching them install some ancient edition of Windows in which to do the testing, and how snappy and responsive the interface was.
        • danielvaughn 3y ago
          My first computer was a 95 Packard Bell. I was 12 years old at the time, so I might be misremembering, but I swear the interface responsiveness felt immediate.
          • Fnoord 3y ago
            Dan Luu did various tests on keyboard and terminal latency. Its not pretty. However a modern desktop have a compositor (since Vista, Linux since XFree86 -> X.org, and macOS since forever). This is essentially double screen rendering.
• cesaref 3y ago
  I'm not convinced this is the right criteria to compare these processors (core count and purchase cost). When looking at these high core count processors, the typical use case is for a server in a data centre, and these sorts of applications run 24/7 and the cost of power is a massive part of the TCO. I think you have to address power per gflop when evaluating performance for these parts, as this is the criteria they were designed against. I think the processors are costed in consideration of the TCO of a 2U dual socket machine with a 2-3 year expected lifespan. They will be designed and costed to show year on year improvements. Oh, and i'm not sure inflation was included as it will be relevant over the timescales involved.
• nologic01 3y ago
  In fact the CPU stagnation is worse. In contrast to the shrinking chip size and higher frequencies of past scaling laws, CPU core count does not easily translate to performance gains. It needs specialized and careful designed software to tap the capability. In fact if CPU core count did translate more easily to performance gains I think already with the existing CPU's we'd have a fairly signficant one-time boost. Maybe somebody has statistical survey of how much of the existing deployed CPU core count is typically used?
  • rbanffy 3y ago
    > It needs specialized and careful designed software to tap the capability. I've been suggesting engineers get more cores of lower speed to gain insight on what will be performant a few years down the road since I saw my first Xeon Phi. It's been a while since clock speeds got higher (IBM has been pushing 5GHz in their highest end for the past couple years now and it doesn't seem likely they'll cross 6 anytime soon), but we get more cores every year. We now have 4-core entry-level machines and 2-core/4-thread ones are the bottom of the barrel, with a decent one being 8-core. Ampère just announced a 192-core server beast. And then we have another thing: performance for most users has been "good enough" for the past couple decades. I haven't gotten a new computer just because it had a faster CPU since the early 2000's - they usually turn to dust well before they become too slow to use. My wife will need to upgrade her Macbook soon-ish for regulatory reasons (when Apple EOLs and stops patching macOS 12) and her laptop is still going strong. Considering that, there is little advantage in making all but the most demanding software more parallel. This leaves the high-end, the stuff that needs a POWER10 or a Telum to run at acceptable speeds, and the cloud vendors, who'd kill to be able to serve 1% more VMs per kilowatt because 1% of their revenue is the GDP of a small country.
    • robocat 3y ago
      > and the cloud vendors, who'd kill to be able to serve 1% more VMs per kilowatt If Google's only expense were electricity, and profit margin was 50%, then saving 1% on power bill would increase profits by 1%. I skimmed the Alphabet annual report: saw $260 revenue, $80 profit, $110 operating expenses (electricity and staff). Say $10 on power, then 1% is $0.1 - improve profits a bit over 0.1%. Anyone know how many $/year Google spends on power?
• nickdothutton 3y ago
  I found the single core SPECInt figures for the last couple of decades very interesting. The curve flattens. Apologies for link to the bird site, but I’m mobile and it’s the fastest way I can find it, I think some of your will enjoy the diagram. https://twitter.com/nickdothutton/status/1194978743250538496?s=61&t=u9t-mzctVjlXpaJY2nJwZQ https://twitter.com/nickdothutton/status/1194978743250538496...
• meindnoch 3y ago
  We might need to stop writing JavaScript? Please no :'(
  • shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Please yes. >:)
• paulddraper 3y ago
  "When you can't scale up, scale out." GPUs have strong potential for improvement, and moving workloads to them helps on multiple fronts: performance, cost, power consumption.
  • mcguire 3y ago
    If your workload is the embarrassingly parallel type that GPUs are designed for.
• rektide 3y ago
  Zen 4C is somewhat delayed but should be an interesting shift on these great numbers. It's a significsntly smaller core, first for servers, then latter big/little consumer parts. Maybe the IPC or GHz really will be significantly lower, but I tend to think things like cache size will be the biggest hit, and that cache size change wouldn't show up in these graphs. Essentially, same number of transistors, but more compute less cache is my guess. But perhaps the cores really are smaller & narrower & the IPC * GHz rating doesnt budge much!
• bhouston 3y ago
  I think you should factor in inflation. Inflation has been significant recently. Also you are not comparing to Intel's cost per core which would show that this pricing issue is not new. I think you just didn't notice it before.
  • IshKebab 3y ago
    Inflation has only been significant in the last 2 years max.
• hospitalJail 3y ago
  Up until this year, CPU was never my limiting factor. We always used multithreaded or GPUs. This year has seen a need for a decent CPU for occasions where we must single thread. Both Local AI and python development. For so long, we never maxed out our CPU.
  • lostmsu 3y ago
    Just don't get stuck in Python.
• crabbone 3y ago
  There were multiple mentions in this thread contrasting GPU with CPU... I think, there's some conceptual gap here. GPUs are made of the same thing as CPUs, they have all the same problems CPUs have. They emphasize vectorized operations, and some less important (for this thread) stuff, like video encoding / decoding, but, by and large, the "PU" part is not accidentally the same in both acronyms. The difference comes from usage. CPUs are shared by processes and threads that are designed to be unaware of each other, or to be even hostile. At the same time, a lot of programs are built in such a way that they don't exploit the parallelism available to them through CPU, or, even if they do, they do it in a very clumsy way (through a bunch of wrappers with their own limitations). To contrast this, GPU programs typically use the whole GPU at once, and are written with parallelism in mind, with little to no wrappers. Similarly, because the basic unit of CPU usage is a process, and the model of using CPUs is that processes aren't allowed to know about each other by default, the memory use becomes more involved, inter-process communication becomes more involved, permissions, access to network etc. -- all this complicates and slows down programs which want to use CPUs. But, if, somehow, there was an OS that could use GPU to run processes on it, use VRAM for code / data of those processes etc. -- we'd have the same problems.
  • tedsanders 3y ago
    Indeed, GPUs are not much better. For example, the NVIDIA H100 SXM has roughly the same price per transistor as the A100 SXM. The gains between generations were roughly equally split between (1) better chip design, (2) higher clock speed / power consumption, and (3) more transistors. Cost per transistor did not meaningfully improve.
    • cubefox 3y ago
      GPUs have a much higher typical utilization than CPUs, I think that's what the previous poster wanted to say.
  • int_19h 3y ago
    > GPU programs typically use the whole GPU at once I don't think this is really true anymore? I mean, on a composited desktop, pretty much any UI app is a "GPU program". If you run a video game and it's not full screen, it's sharing the GPU (and it's increasingly common for "full screen" to actually mean a borderless window, too). Video players offload decoding. And then there's all the stuff that's using GPU to accelerate generic compute. And once you have such sharing, it's just as adversarial as processes sharing CPU, when it comes to resource allocation, security etc.
• bhouston 3y ago
  This "stagnation" is nothing like the stagnation during AMD's poorly performing Bulldozer era (the post Athlon era) where they were consistently beat by Intel's offerings and there was a general lack of innovation in the prosumer space. During that era for the most part Intel's i7 prosumer CPUs started with 4 cores with the Bloomfield Nehalem chips in 2008 (which at the time were awesome and a game changer) and ended with 4 cores with the Kaby Lake-S in 2017. It really only changed in 2017 with AMD Ryzen forcing Intel to actually increase core count. 2008 Nehalem benchmark: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/778/IntelR-CoreTM-i7-CPU---------960----320GHz https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/778/IntelR-CoreTM-i7... 2017 Kaby Lake-S benchmark: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Intel-Core-i7-7700/Rating/3887 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Intel-Core-i7-7700/Rating/3887 When I compare the two, it shows an effective 20% speed increase, although microbenchmarks show a 50% increase. That is a stagnation. During that era it felt like a lost decade. I don't miss it.
  • semi-extrinsic 3y ago
    Can confirm, I bought a pair of desktops for work in 2012 with Ivy Brige i7's that could "turbo boost" to 3.9 GHz indefinitely without overclock. I did not feel a real upgrade need until the 32 core Threadripper machines came out in 2018.
    • amiga-workbench 3y ago
      I only just upgraded from my i5 3570K to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Not because anything I was currently doing with my computer was becoming too slow, but because I wanted to do new things (VR). A shame, I wanted to run that thing into the ground. I've got my old system sat spare, I'm not sure what to do with it.
      • dmarchand90 3y ago
        Nice processor choice... vrchat in mind? Haha
        • amiga-workbench 3y ago
• trynumber9 3y ago
  I'm still impressed by 64 core Genoa. It is 1.7x the total performance (cores * clock rate * IPC) compared to 64 core Milan in the table presented. That's not even two years apart. I know the die sizes didn't decrease much, around 10% or so. And R&D increase is surely surpassing inflation.
• christkv 3y ago
  What’s the power use vs performance look like over the same period?
• sspiff 3y ago
  This analysis is wrong because it is focusing on a limited number of high end chips. You can buy CPUs that cost a fraction of any of those listed that will absolutely demolish even the best chips from 6 years ago today. All while consuming drastically less power for that performance as well. Even mobile chips over 2 years old are within margin of error performance distance to those entry level Naples chips listed, at a fraction of the cost and power consumption. I would not call that stagnation.
  • anonymousDan 3y ago
    Thanks, I was hoping someone would comment as to why the article might be wrong. I also wonder what the trends look like in terms of performance per watt?
    • sspiff 3y ago
      It's hard to say without actually testing the hardware with a power meter, since throttling plays such a big role and power budgets advertised are often just a single figure approximation of a much more complicated formula. I run a home server powered by a Ryzen 5800H, nominally a 45W part, but I've seen it maintain a power draw far higher than that for hours under sustained load.
• captainbland 3y ago
  I'd say the desktop CPU situation is doing pretty alright. My 10400F is feeling very modest compared to pretty much everything in the 13xxx and ryzen 7000 lineup. Frustrating given how deadend the chipset I got was.
• durandal1 3y ago
  What seemingly has stagnated even more is our ability to write fast and responsive software. We have oceans of compute power, blazingly fast I/O, and yet, it's expected and accepted for mundane tasks to take hundreds of milliseconds to complete.
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  We are off the exponential curve until a completely new method is discovered, which of course might not exist. Maybe our great^n grandchildren will then have lives very similar to the great^n+1 grandchildren thereafter, just like the older days!
  • cubefox 3y ago
    Well, strong AI seems not far off, and AI scales, via recursive self-improvement, easily to the boundary of the physical limits. Dyson spheres, Jupiter brains. There doesn't seem to be a major plateau on the horizon.
• IAmPaigeAT 3y ago
  Ugh, you know it really wouldn’t be so bad if they would just go back to selling cpus like they're meant to be kept around for more than a year. The thing that has me really ticked off at Intel right now is the i915 sriov capabilities introduced in 11th gen which were meant to supersede GVT-G. I didn’t even know GVT-G was a thing until it was already gone. They didn’t even make a driver that supports 11th gen and 12th is apparently supported in some capacity but I’m not understanding it very well myself. I damn sure wouldn’t buy a 12th gen though if its a thing you think you might actually care about. If 11th gen is any example of how 12th will turn out, any development will be left up to one person who miraculously understands i915 well enough to develop for it, doing for free and doing a good job but not well enough to keep up with linus/linux~HEAD; needless to say if 11th gen support for i915 sriov does ever get merged the cheap low quality construction of the hardware will probably be starting to break down, seems like most of it is by the time you unbox it anyway these days :(
  • IAmPaigeAT 3y ago
    There’s actually 2, theres the intel lts one, which i guess they did do something it just never amounted to anything, explained here: https://github.com/intel/linux-intel-lts/issues/33 https://github.com/intel/linux-intel-lts/issues/33 The ongoing development: https://github.com/strongtz/i915-sriov-dkms https://github.com/strongtz/i915-sriov-dkms
• cubefox 3y ago
  It isn't just CPUs either. For GPUs, a 2018 analysis [1] estimated that FLOPS per dollar only doubled every 3.9 years. With recent disappointing improvements in new graphics card price/performance, I expect this number got even worse now. [1] http://mediangroup.org/gpu.html http://mediangroup.org/gpu.html
• borissk 3y ago
  The slowdown of x86 processor progress was caused by the very slow adoption by Intel of new fab processes. 14nm CPUs came out in 2014, 10nm mobile only (Tiger Lake) came out in the end of 2020. Almost three years later still no commercial CPUs by Intel on 7nm. They used to be a lot faster, 22nm CPUs (Ivy Bridge) came out in 2012 - so around 2 years to go from 22 to 14.
  • bcrl 3y ago
    Not really. Clock speeds for CPUs have stagnated because they hit the power wall back in the P4 days. Part of what enabled the relentless clock increased from the 1970s until the early 2000s is that each generation of CPU ran at a substantially lower voltage than the previous generation while being able to use more power. Going from 5 volts to 3.3 volts is a substantial power saving that gives you headroom to increase clock speed, but going from 1.1V to 1.05V is not nearly as much of an improvement. Once CPUs started dissipating 100-150 watts of power and voltages only drop by a few percent each generation, there's simply no power budget left to increase clocks. Current cores can run at upwards of 7 GHz (just look at the overclocking records) with liquid nitrogen cooling to dump the power increase, but virtually nobody will use such a system in the real world. The reason we see increasing core counts is that 2 cores consume roughly 2x the power of 1 core (well, slightly more). Doubling clock speed from 5 GHz to 10 GHz would cost way more than 2x the power. Furthermore, pumping that much heat out of a sub-100mm^2 die gets harder and harder. You can have more transistors in a small space, but you simply can't have them change state much more than the previous generation did.