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I don't get how you claim CPUs are the same as 20 years ago? Maybe the clock speed is the same, but they are demonstrably denser. Lithography continues to impro

by dexwiz 3y ago

I don't get how you claim CPUs are the same as 20 years ago? Maybe the clock speed is the same, but they are demonstrably denser. Lithography continues to improve as extreme costs, so wins are eaked out. The numbers don't seem to change much, but that is because we are approaching a limit of what a transistor can do with current approaches, and alternative approaches are literally millennia of engineering hours behind. Intel and x86(_64) has had a hold for two decades, but GPUs and AArch64 are making inroads addressing memory bandwidth issues.

apantel 3y ago
I was basically saying that there are no more order-of-magnitude type gains to be had in CPU performance (edit: with current technology, as far as I’m aware). A top-of-the-line processor today is maybe 3x more capable than one from a decade ago. And that doesn’t help with the real bottleneck of accessing memory, especially main memory, which is bound by the laws of physics. The CPU can’t do anything until it has the data, no matter how fast it is. Also, CPU’s are eking out wins by doing more and more complicated things like speculative execution and out-of-order execution, which makes it harder and harder for the programmer at a high level to reason about performance and actually write software that gets the most out of the hardware. Add in the fact that software is tending to get more and more bloated without equal energy being invested in making it more performant… My argument is that major performance improvements are only hard-won these days by really dedicated developers because we’re getting diminishing returns from hardware and it’s harder than ever to write performant software.
- johngossman 3y ago
  CPU performance isn't making 2x leaps as quickly as it did in the 80s and 90s, but you're vastly understating the performance and power efficiency improvements that have been made over the last decade.

by dexwiz 3y ago

apantel 3y ago

I was basically saying that there are no more order-of-magnitude type gains to be had in CPU performance (edit: with current technology, as far as I’m aware). A top-of-the-line processor today is maybe 3x more capable than one from a decade ago. And that doesn’t help with the real bottleneck of accessing memory, especially main memory, which is bound by the laws of physics. The CPU can’t do anything until it has the data, no matter how fast it is. Also, CPU’s are eking out wins by doing more and more complicated things like speculative execution and out-of-order execution, which makes it harder and harder for the programmer at a high level to reason about performance and actually write software that gets the most out of the hardware. Add in the fact that software is tending to get more and more bloated without equal energy being invested in making it more performant… My argument is that major performance improvements are only hard-won these days by really dedicated developers because we’re getting diminishing returns from hardware and it’s harder than ever to write performant software.

johngossman 3y ago
CPU performance isn't making 2x leaps as quickly as it did in the 80s and 90s, but you're vastly understating the performance and power efficiency improvements that have been made over the last decade.