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PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon
- mtucker502 7mo agoWhat progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?
- magic_man 7mo agoThe energy consumed is cv^2f. It makes no sense to keep increasing frequency as you make power way worse.
- vlovich123 7mo agoSo heat. There’s efforts to switch to optics which don’t have that heat problem so much but have the problem that it’s really hard to build an optical transistor. + anywhere your interfacing with the electrical world you’re back to the heat problem. Maybe reversible computing will help unlock several more orders of magnitude of growth.
- dlcarrier 7mo agoAt lower frequencies, leakage current plays a larger role than gate capacitance, so for any given process node, there's a sweet spot. For medium to low loads, it takes less power to rapidly switch between cutting off power to a core, and running at a higher frequency than is needed, than to run at a lower frequency. Newer process nodes decrease the per-gate capacitance, increasing the optimal operating frequency.
- vessenes 7mo agoLike any doubling rule, the buck has to stop somewhere. Higher energy usage + smaller geometry means much more exotic analog physics to worry about in chips. I’m not a silicon engineer by any means but I’d expect 10Ghz cycles will be optical or very exotically cooled or not coming at us at all.
- adrian_b 7mo agoReaching 10 GHz for a CPU will never be done in silicon. It could be done if either silicon will be replaced with another semiconductor or semiconductors will be replaced with something else for making logical gates, e.g. with organic molecules, to be able to design a logical gate atom by atom. For the first variant, i.e. replacing silicon with another semiconductor, research is fairly advanced, but this would increase the fabrication cost so it will be done only when any methods for further improvements of silicon integrated circuits will become ineffective or too expensive, which is unlikely to happen earlier than a decade from now.
- Hikikomori 7mo agoOverclockers are pretty close.
- adrian_b 7mo agoWhat can be done by raising the power consumption per core to hundreds of watt, while cooling the package with liquid nitrogen, is completely irrelevant for what can be done with a CPU that must operate reliably for years and at an acceptable cost for the energy consumption. For the latter case, 6 GHz has been barely reached, in CPUs that cannot be produced in large quantities and whose reliability is dubious.
- FpUser 7mo agoHaving RAM read / write faster will be of way more benefit
- HarHarVeryFunny 7mo agoWhat would be the benefit? You don't need a 10GHz processor to browse the web, or edit a spreadsheet, and in any case things like that are already multi-threaded. The current direction of adding more cores makes more sense, since this is really what CPU intensive programs generally need - more parallelism.
- nurettin 7mo agoSingle core speed is absolutely a thing that is needed and preferred to multicore. That's why we have avx, amx, etc.
- KeplerBoy 7mo agoMeh, avx is also just parallelism. That won't get you around Amdahl's law.
- nurettin 7mo agoNot sure what you mean. It lets you do 64 operations with one instruction. Where's the diminishing returns?
- adrian_b 7mo agoVector or matrix instructions do not improve single-thread speed in the correct meaning of this term, because they cannot improve the speed of a program that executes a sequence of dependent operations. Their purpose is to provide parallel execution at a lower cost in die area and at a better energy efficiency than by multiplying the number of cores. For instance, having 16 cores with 8-wide vector execution units provides the same throughput as 128 cores, but at a much lower power consumption and at a much smaller die area. However, both structures need groups of 128 independent operations every clock cycle, to keep busy all execution units. The terms "single-thread" performance vs. "multi-threaded" performance are not really correct. What matters is the 2 performance values that characterize a CPU when executing a set of independent operations vs. executing a set of operations that are functionally-dependent, i.e. the result of each operation is an operand for the next operation. When executing a chain of dependent operation, the performance is determined by the sum of the latencies of the operations and it is very difficult to improve the performance otherwise than by raising the clock frequency. On the other hand, when the operations are independent, they can be executed concurrently and with enough execution units the performance may be limited only by the operation with the longest duration, no matter how many other operations are executed in parallel. For parallel execution, there are many implementation methods that are used together, because for most of them there are limits for the maximum multiplication factor, caused by constraints like the lengths of the interconnection traces on the silicon die. So some of the concurrently executed operations are executed in different stages of an execution pipeline, others are executed in different execution pipelines (superscalar execution), others are executed in different SIMD lanes of a vector execution pipeline, others are executed in different CPU cores of the same CPU complex, others are executed in different CPU cores that are located on separate dies in the same package, others are executed in CPU cores located in a different socket in the same motherboard, others in CPU cores located in other cases in the same rack, and so on. Instead of the terms "single-thread performance" and "multi-threaded performance" it would have been better to talk about performance for dependent operations and performance for independent operations. There is little if anything that can be done by a programmer to improve the performance for the execution of a chain of dependent instructions. This is determined by the design and the fabrication of the CPU. On the other either the compiler or the programmer must ensure that the possibility of executing operations in parallel is exploited at the maximum extent possible, by using various means, e.g. creating multiple threads, which will be scheduled on different CPU cores, using the available SIMD instructions and interleaving any chains of dependent instructions, so that the adjacent instructions will be independent and they will be executed either in different pipeline stages or in different execution pipelines. Most modern CPUs use out-of-order execution, so the exact order of interleaved dependent instructions is not critical, because they will be reordered by the CPU, but some interleaving done by the compiler or by the programmer is still necessary, because the hardware uses a limited instruction window within which reordering is possible.
- brennanpeterson 7mo agoNone for normal.compute, since energy density is still fundamental. But the interesting option is cryogenic computing, which can have zero switching energy, and 10s of GHz clock rates Some neat startups to watch for in this space.
- sparkie 7mo agoThat's not going to happen, but there's alternative research such as [1] where we get rid of the clock and use self-timed circuits. [1]:https://arc.cecs.pdx.edu/ https://arc.cecs.pdx.edu/
- amelius 7mo agoThere have been overclockers who reached 9GHz using liquid helium. It's simply impossible at room temperatures without extreme cooling. Also you will run into interconnect speed issues, since 10GHz corresponds to .1 nanoseconds which corresponds to 3 centimeters (assuming lightspeed, in reality this is lower). So sadly, we'll be stuck in this "clock-speed winter" for a little longer.
- dd_xplore 7mo agoI remember back in 2006 I used to browse overclock forums to overclock my pentium 4, I tons of fun consuming lots of instructions, I learned the bios, changed PLL clocks, mem clocks etc.
- rckclmbr 7mo agoI bought a car radiator and dremeled out my case, visited Home Depot for all the tubes and connectors. It’s too easy nowadays to add watercooling
- Sharlin 7mo agoThe i486DX 33MHz was introduced in May 1990. A 30x increase, or about five doublings, in clock speeds over ten years. That's of course not the whole truth; the Athlon could do much more in one cycle than the 486. In any case, in 2010 we clearly did not have 30GHz processors – by then, the era of exponentially rising clock speeds was very decidedly over. I bought an original quadcore i7 in 2009 and used it for the next fifteen years. In that time, roughly one doubling in the number of cores and one doubling in clock speeds occurred.
- adrian_b 7mo ago"The era of exponentially rising clock speeds" was already over in 2003, when the 130-nm Pentium 4 reached 3.2GHz. All the later CMOS fabrication processes, starting with the 90-nm process (in 2004), have provided only very small improvements in the clock frequency, so that now, 23 years later after 2003, the desktop CPUs have not reached a double clock frequency yet. In the history of computers, the decade with the highest rate of clock frequency increase has been 1993 to 2003, during which the clock frequency has increased from 67 MHz in 1993 in the first Pentium, up to 3.2 GHz in the last Northwood Pentium 4. So the clock frequency had increased almost 50 times during that decade. For comparison, in the previous decade, 1983 to 1993, the clock frequency in mass-produced CPUs had increased only around 5 times, i.e. at a rate about 10 times slower than in the next decade.
- hedora 7mo agoSort of: The Pentium 4 was a strange chip. It had way too many pipeline steps, and was basically just chasing high clock speed marketing numbers instead of performance. In other words, it hit "3.2GHz" by cheating. I'd argue you'd need to use AMD's Athlon XP or 64 bit processors, or either Pentium 3 / Core 2 Duo to figure out when clock speeds stopped increasing.
- crest 7mo agoOne crazy detail about the Pentium 4 is that even at 3.2GHz the simple integer ALUs ran at twice the clock speed. Which allows the cursed thing to run two add with carry instructions per cycle.
- xnx 7mo agoThe Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements). Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
- HPsquared 7mo agoSSDs were such a revolution though, and a really rewarding upgrade. I'd fit SSDs to friend and family computers as an upgrade.
- sigmoid10 7mo agoI once had a decade old Thinkpad that suddenly became my new work laptop once more thanks to an SSD. It's a true shame they simply don't make them like this anymore.
- micv 7mo agoGetting my first SSD was absolutely the best computer upgrade I've ever bought. I didn't even realise how annoying load times were because I was so used to them and coming from C64s and Amigas even spinning rust seemed fairly quick. It took a long time before I felt a need to improve my PC's performance again after that.
- coffeebeqn 7mo agoThere were quite a few mind blowing upgrades back in the day. The first sound card instead of PC beeper was one of my most memorable moments. I remember loading up Doom, plugging my shitty earplugs that had a barely long enough cable and hearing the “real” shotgun sound for the first time. Oo-wee
- dcminter 7mo agoJust before I installed an SSD was the last time I owned a computer that felt slow.
- patwolf 7mo ago
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoArgh. The headline. The opener. Awful. Where are editors in 2026? There's no way an LLM would write this. The GHz barrier wasn't special. What was much more important was the fact that AMD was giving Intel a hard time and there was finally hard competition.
- HarHarVeryFunny 7mo agoThere was a time where increased clock speeds, or more generally increased processor throughput was important. I can remember when computers were slow, even for things like browsing the web (and not just because internet connection speeds were slow), and paying more for a new faster computer made sense. I think this time period may well have lasted roughly until the "GHz era" or thereabouts, after which even the cheapest, slowest, computers were all that anybody really needed, except for gamers where the the solution was a faster graphics card (which eventually lead to GPU-computing and the current AI revolution!)
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoYou're conflating a few things here. The Vista era was the biggest requirement hit. That was the time where people really needed a faster PC to continue browsing. Before that, you could get away with XP running on a sub-GHz processor.
- tosti 7mo agoThat's not how I remember recent history because Linux was already pretty good before microslop XP came out. I've been daily driving cheap junk ever since, no regrets.
- adrian_b 7mo agoIn terms of marketing, the "GHz" barrier was special, because surpassing it has indeed created a lot of recognition in the general public for the fact that the AMD Athlon CPUs were better than the Intel Pentium III CPUs. In reality, of course what you say is true and the fact that Athlon could previde a few extra hundreds of MHz in the clock frequency was not decisive. Athlon had many improvements in microarchitecture in comparison with Pentium III, which ensured a much better performance even at equal clock frequency. For instance, Athlon was the first x86 CPU that was able to do both a floating-point multiplication and a floating-point addition in a single clock cycle. Pentium III, like all previous Intel Pentium CPUs required 2 clock cycles for this pair of operations. This much better floating-point performance of Athlon vs. Intel contrasted with the previous generation, where AMD K6 had competitive integer performance with Intel, but its floating-point performance was well below that of the various Intel Pentium models (which had hurt its performance in some games).
- hedora 7mo agoThe Athlon XP was the bigger milestone, as I remember it. They were both "seventh generation" according to their marketing, but you could get an entire GHz+ Athlon XP machine for much less than half the $990 tray price from the article. I distinctly remember the day work bought a 5 or 6 node cluster for $2000. (A local computer shop gave us a bulk discount and assembled it for them, so sadly, I didn't poke around inside the boxes much.) We had a Solaris workstation that retailed for $10K in the same office. Its per-core speed was comparable to one Athlon machine, so the cluster ran circles around it for our workload. Intel was completely missing in action at that point, despite being the market leader. They were about to release the Pentium 4, and didn't put anything decent out from then to the Core 2 Duo. (The Pentium 4 had high clock rates, but low instructions per cycle, so it didn't really matter. Then AMD beat Intel to market with 64 bit support.) I suspect history is in the process of repeating itself. My $550 AMD box happily runs Qwen 3.5 (32B parameters). An nvidia board that can run that costs > 4x as much.
- ahartmetz 7mo agoThe article links to a list of "The five greatest AMD CPUs". I've owned two and a half of these! Athlon XP 1800+, Ryzen 7 1700 (I had the 1800X which was just a higher bin of the same chip), and Ryzen 9 3950X. That same article also says that extending x86 to 64 bits "wasn't hard", which I'm not so sure about. There are plenty of mistakes AMD could have made and cleanups they could have missed, but they handled it all quite well AFAICS.
- iknowstuff 7mo agoNext up AI 395+. I love this thing. Sips power!
- ahartmetz 7mo agoI got one of these in a laptop. For a laptop, not really, especially in idle (6-7 watts for the whole laptop). It's quite good anyway.
- davidee 7mo agoI have very fond memories of my first dual-cpu Athlon machine. It was the workstation on which I learned Logic Audio before, you know, Apple bought Emagic. I took that machine, running very low latency Reason to live gigs with my band. Carting around a full-tower computer (not to mention the large CRT monitor we needed) next to a bunch of tube Fender & Ampeg amps was wild at the time. Finding a good drummer was hard; we turned that challenge into a lot of fun programming rhythm sections we could jam to, and control in real-time, live.
- paulryanrogers 7mo agoMy first 1GHz was an AMD, also my first non-Intel, and its required fan was so loud that I was glad to get rid of it. The speed was nice, and some competition helped lower prices.
- herodoturtle 7mo agoI remember upgrading my 486 DX2 66Mhz to a DX4 100Mhz and all of a sudden being able to run winamp and Quake. That felt pretty epic at the time.
- jmyeet 7mo agoI have a hard time remembering what computers I had in the 1990s now. I had an 8086 in the 1980s. I think the next one I had was a 486/33 in the early 90s and I had this for years. I remember having a Cyrix 586 at some point later. I think the next jump was in the early 2000s and I honestly don't rmeember what that CPU was so I can't say when I got my first 1GHz+ CPU. Probably that 2002 PC. No idea what it was now. But it did survive in some form for another 12 years. Fun fact #1: many today may not know that the only reason switched to the Pentium name was because a court ruled that they couldn't trademark a number and AMD had cross-licensed the microarchitecture and instruction set to AMD and Cyrix. It was the Pentium 4 when clock speeds went insane and became a huge marketing point even though Pentium chips had lower IPC than Athlons (at that time). There was a belief that CPUs would keep going to 10GHz+. Instead they hit a ceiling at about ~3GHz, that's barely increased to this day (ignoring burst modes). Intel originally intended to move workstations and servers to the EPIC architecture (eg Merced was an early chip in this series). This began in the 1990s but was years delayed and required writing software a very particular way. It never delievered on its promise. And AMD, thanks to the earlier cross-licensing agreement, just ate Intel's lunch with the Athlon 64 starting in 2003 by adding the x86_64 instructions, which we still use today. Fun Fact #2: it was the Pentium 3 that saved Intel's hide long after it was discontinued in favor of the Pentium 4. The early 2000s were the nascent era of multi-core CPUs. The Pentium 3 had survived in mobile chips and become the Pentium-M and then the Core Duo (and Core 2 Duo later). This was the Centrino platform and included wireless (IIRC 802.11b/g). The Pentium 4 hit the Gigahertz ceiling and EPIC wasn't going to happen to Intel went back to the drawing board, revived the mobile Pentium-3 platform, adding AMD's 64 bit instructions and released their desktop CPUs. Even modern Intel CPUs are in many ways a derivation of the Pentium-3 [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_processors
- random3 7mo agoFun times. Coolers, paste, fans, supply watts, dip switches and jumpers. Quake, Voodoo 3dfx vs NVidia GForce. This is where it all started, kids. I was in high school and was running a "computer games club" (~ Internet cafe for games and kids) since 1998 when we got a place, renovated it ourselves, got custom built furniture (cheap narrow desks) and initially 6 computers - AMDs at 300Mhz. By 2000 we broke a wall in the adjacent space and had ~15, cable + satellite internet for downloads and whatever video cards we could buy or scrap. It was wild.
- nikanj 7mo agoFinding high school kids with a similar "tech" background today seems really hard. Tech users, sure, chronic phone / game addicts are everywhere, but that tweaker spirit is rare
- Razengan 7mo ago> This is where it all started, kids. Nah.. Cassettes, computers-in-a-keyboard, booting straight into BASIC.. THIS is where it all started, grandkids.
- random3 7mo agoHahaha! True. I was pointing out the beginnings of modern GPUs and NVidia, but yes heard the cassette screeching before the modem screeching indeed.
- ehnto 7mo agoI bought a whole bunch of parts with my first Athlon. I think I bought a Soundblaster, and a Radeon GFX card if I am remembering the timeline right. The soundblaster came with a demo of a Lara Croft game that used the then incredible spatial audio processing to great effect. The industry promptly forgot about that technology, and to this day game audio rarely matches the potential of real time spatial dynamics that we once reached 20 years ago.
- phil21 7mo agoSpatial audio is pretty good these days on some titles. It's just most folks don't have a sound system that can really do much with it. Headphones can only do so much in this arena. Couple a modern AAA title (like Battlefield 6, etc.) with a proper Atmos sound system and you will likely be pretty amazed. Even a simple 5.1 setup is pretty decent for hearing footsteps behind you/etc. which actually does help with gameplay. I haven't kept up on it as my computer gaming area doesn't lend itself towards a proper speaker setup these days, but playing with headphones on lately has made me start to look into this again. I need to find some high quality tiny cube speakers or something to be able to put in weird spots on the ceilings/walls.
- fleventynine 7mo agoI upgraded to this exact CPU from a 200MHz pentium in the fall of 2000. Easily the largest jump in performance of any upgrade I've ever done.
- nikanj 7mo agoThe craziest thing is, I don't actually know how many gigahertz either my PC or my macbook are. The megahertz race used to fierce!
- myself248 7mo agoIt's essentially random at any given moment. If I peek, mine will say it's running anywhere between 700MHz and 3.4GHz. Sometimes I think it goes even faster, but only if it's weirdly cold at the time.
- nunez 7mo agoWhat a time to be a kid then. We had a hand-me-down DEC x86 desktop at home with a Pentium II running at 233 MHz until I want to say 2002? This was around the time I learned how to build a PC since doing that was cheaper than buying one and no-one in my family had the money for that! I saved whatever money I could to buy a 128MB stick of RAM from Staples (maybe it was 256MB?), a few other things from TigerDirect/Newegg and _this processor_. With some help from my uncle and a guide I printed from somewhere whose website started with '3D' (it was quite popular back then; I don't think it exists anymore), I got it done. Going from 233 MHz to this was like going from walking to flying in a jet! Everything was SO MUCH F**ING FASTER. Windows XP _flew_. (The DEC barely made the minimum requirements for it, and boy did I feel it.) Trying to install Longhorn on it a year or two later brought me back into walking again, though. :D
- general_reveal 7mo agoGeForce 3.
- lovehashbrowns 7mo agoMy first pc I built was with an AMD athlon 64 4000+ and a GeForce 6600GT. Going to that from an e-machines piece of junk was INSANE. It’s so hard to come up with a similar experience shift nowadays. Even websites seemed to load instantly with the same DSL connection. Everything felt soooooo good.
- apitman 7mo agoThis is very close to my fist build. I believe 3600+ in my case. Edit: ok I looked it up because I was curious and newegg never deletes anything from order history. Athlon 64 3200+ and 6600GT. Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2. I got a great deal on a case+enermax power supply at Fry's Electronics.
- crims0n 7mo agoYou reminded me that building use to be considerably cheaper than buying. I remember my teen years, doing odd jobs to get some cash, buying a part at a time until the build was complete. Worrying that if you didn't scrap together enough parts soon there may be an architecture change. Finally getting it all together and the feeling of pure bliss installing the OS, troubleshooting drivers, installing this or that. Good times.
- sys_64738 7mo agoThis was an era where Intel were humiliated by AMD and that caused Intel to execute with precision and direction. Intel's biggest problem is when they're a marketing company first and an engineering company later. When they come from behind then the engineering wins. They can't lead because marketing dictates their direction.
- vivzkestrel 7mo ago1 terahertz processor when?
- itsTyrion 7mo agoAnd now, 26 years later, I have 6 CPU cores, plus SMT, each running at over 4GHz... and the Windows explorer has noticeable loading time at startup and even during clicks :)