4 ms·

I vaguely recall (many years ago) some GPU (a Matrox one iirc) coming out and it being a huge deal because of how many transistors it had. I think it may have b

by olliej 3y ago

I vaguely recall (many years ago) some GPU (a Matrox one iirc) coming out and it being a huge deal because of how many transistors it had. I think it may have been an amazing 100 million. Times have changed :D

jeffbee 3y ago
Sub-micron lithography was also an inflection point in the discourse, even if it was an irrelevant threshold to physicists. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=submicron+lithography&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=submicron+lith...
jdjdjdhhd 3y ago
Computers used to evolve much more quickly... Or at least the improvements made a much bigger difference
- dehrmann 3y ago
  The difference between 1990 and 2000 was astounding. 2000 and 2010 was ok. 2010 and 2020 was meh. Now, what computers did in the 90's, cell networks did from 2005 to 2015.
- holoduke 3y ago
  Moore is still alive. In 2030 we have an estimated one trillion transistors on a chip. We would need that for our ever increasing hunger for memory and processing power. 1TB model on your iphone 22 with 100 tokens per second.
  - rzimmerman 3y ago
    Well technically he died in March, but the law holds true.
1letterunixname 3y ago
MHz->GHz wars. This caused Intel and AMD to chase hyperdeep pipelines with terrible stall characteristics and awful cycle efficiencies. You're misremembering. Matrox cards were also terribly slow in DOS and anything adjacent to 3D. I own several models with SGRAM. Even GeForce 2 GTS: 25m transistors. G200: 10m. Voodoo2: 4m.
- olliej 3y ago
  > You're misremembering. Matrox cards were also terribly slow in DOS and anything adjacent to 3D Nope, it was the Parhelia released in 2002 - so somewhat later than the hardware you're considering. The Parhelia was what I was thinking of, with a truly insane number of transistors: 80 million! ("something like" was bearing quite a lot of weight in my first comment :D ). However it was only in the same ballpark, not actually faster that the Geforce 4 Ti or the Radeon 8500, and it was more expensive, so failed in the market. The relevant anandtech review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/936 https://www.anandtech.com/show/936 (post 936, vs this week's Qualcomm which is post 21112 :D )

by olliej 3y ago

jeffbee 3y ago

Sub-micron lithography was also an inflection point in the discourse, even if it was an irrelevant threshold to physicists. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=submicron+lithography&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=submicron+lith...

jdjdjdhhd 3y ago

Computers used to evolve much more quickly... Or at least the improvements made a much bigger difference

dehrmann 3y ago
The difference between 1990 and 2000 was astounding. 2000 and 2010 was ok. 2010 and 2020 was meh. Now, what computers did in the 90's, cell networks did from 2005 to 2015.
holoduke 3y ago
Moore is still alive. In 2030 we have an estimated one trillion transistors on a chip. We would need that for our ever increasing hunger for memory and processing power. 1TB model on your iphone 22 with 100 tokens per second.
- rzimmerman 3y ago
  Well technically he died in March, but the law holds true.

1letterunixname 3y ago

MHz->GHz wars. This caused Intel and AMD to chase hyperdeep pipelines with terrible stall characteristics and awful cycle efficiencies. You're misremembering. Matrox cards were also terribly slow in DOS and anything adjacent to 3D. I own several models with SGRAM. Even GeForce 2 GTS: 25m transistors. G200: 10m. Voodoo2: 4m.

olliej 3y ago
> You're misremembering. Matrox cards were also terribly slow in DOS and anything adjacent to 3D Nope, it was the Parhelia released in 2002 - so somewhat later than the hardware you're considering. The Parhelia was what I was thinking of, with a truly insane number of transistors: 80 million! ("something like" was bearing quite a lot of weight in my first comment :D ). However it was only in the same ballpark, not actually faster that the Geforce 4 Ti or the Radeon 8500, and it was more expensive, so failed in the market. The relevant anandtech review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/936 https://www.anandtech.com/show/936 (post 936, vs this week's Qualcomm which is post 21112 :D )