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For workloads not offloaded to dedicated hardware (NN/LLM), I say CPUs for end users have been "good enough" for four or five years. The impressive things have
by unethical_ban 3y ago
For workloads not offloaded to dedicated hardware (NN/LLM), I say CPUs for end users have been "good enough" for four or five years.
The impressive things have been in efficiency, and in implementing new kinds of logic/instructions/architectures.
I'd be plenty happy with my 5+ year old laptop if it had more than 40 minutes of battery life (Yeah I need to order a new battery. Yes, batteries used to be replaceable in laptops).
- bryanlarsen 3y agoFor desktop CPU's I would say things have been "good enough" for 12 years. Sandy Lake was released in 2011, and was the last CPU from Intel that was at least 25% better than its predecessor. Ever since each generational bump has seen a ~10% bump or so. I still work & game on an i5-2500k.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agoIMO there's a strong case for Haswel as the first "good enough" cpu. It's not a ton faster than sandy lake, but it adds AVX-2 and FMA3 which in lots of software can easily be a 2x performance difference. (and possibly more importantly, if you define that as your baseline, you can compile all x86 applications with the same arch without giving up much performance.