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I think it is often the case that people want to describe the problem as “single core performance has stagnated for decades” because it makes it look like their
by bee_rider 2y ago
I think it is often the case that people want to describe the problem as “single core performance has stagnated for decades” because it makes it look like their solution is necessary to make any progress at all.
Actually, single core performance has been improving. Not as fast as it was in the 90’s maybe, but it is improving.
However, we can speed things up even more by using multiple computers. And it is a really interesting problem where you get to worry about all sorts of fun things, like hiding MPI communication between compute.
Nobody wants to say “I have found that if I can make an already fast process even faster by putting in a lot of effort, which I will do because my job is actually really fun.” Technical jobs are supposed to be stressful and serious. The world is doomed and science will stop… unless I come up with a magic trick!
- Legend2440 2y agoSingle-core performance looks pretty stagnant on this graph, especially in the last ten years: https://imgur.com/DrOvPZt https://imgur.com/DrOvPZt Transistor count has continued to increase exponentially, but single-threaded performance has improved slowly and appears to be leveling off. We may never get another 100x or even 10x improvement in single-threaded performance. It is going to be necessary to parallelize to see gains in the future.
- achierius 2y agoBut it's not flat? 10% growth a year is still growth.
- rbanffy 2y agoMoore's law got my generation spoiled. We had a computer that was twice as fast if we waited for a year.
- bee_rider 2y agoI mean, it definitely isn’t the 90’s anymore, for sure. But I don’t think that chart tells the whole story. First off, it only shows half of the last ten years. Things feel like they’ve been picking up a little bit, with Apple and AMD executing fairly well. Second, average is being dragged down a bit as thin-and-light laptops have become very popular. A lot of the chips in that chart could probably be run faster on a higher energy budget, right?
- Legend2440 2y agoThe raw data is available here, updated to three years ago: https://github.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-trend-data https://github.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-trend-data The trendlines have continued, with only minor increases to single-threaded performance. They're looking at high-end datacenter CPUs, so laptops are not dragging down the average. More energy doesn't help you too much because you start to burn up the chip.
- gregw2 2y agoThe core counts shown seemed grossly wrong (low) to me in all respects, from desktops to laptops to high end datacenter CPUs, so I looked into the assumptions. The chart is from the perpective of CPUs going into HPC clusters, not high end SMP database servers in more commercial datacenters. The industry did have more than one core before 2004. The dataset author's 2016 blog explains "Similarly, I only consider CPUs for dual socket machines" [like Xeon Phi]. I'm not sure, given the HPC orientation why the dataset author didn't show specFP rather than specInt... but if I had to pick one, I'd also pick SpecInt.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- motorest 2y ago> Single-core performance looks pretty stagnant on this graph, especially in the last ten years (...) The vertical axis seems to be in log scale, and single core performance seems to be increasing at the same rate since 2000-2010. This suggests single core performance is actually growing at an exponential rate. What is your interpretation?