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The fastest CPU in 2005 was (I think) the mighty AMD Athlon 64 FX-57, which PassMark rates at: 731. Meanwhile, in 2015, we have the Intel Core i7-5930K which s

by phaemon 11y ago

The fastest CPU in 2005 was (I think) the mighty AMD Athlon 64 FX-57, which PassMark rates at: 731. Meanwhile, in 2015, we have the Intel Core i7-5930K which scores: 13,638.

Someone 11y ago
Ten years is over six of Moore's law 18 month periods, so that 'should' give a factor of over 64 (ignoring the difference between transistor density and speed) Your numbers show a speed up of less than 20.
- phaemon 11y ago
  > so that 'should' give a factor of over 64 No, that's not how trends work. You can't establish a trend from just two data points. And, given a trend, you can't just pick two points and say they should be so far apart. The only way that would work is if all the data points were very close to the trendline. And the only way that would happen is if CPU development happened very smoothly; which it doesn't. You have spurts of performance increase as new architectures are released. The only thing I was showing with those two figures was that it's clearly not true that speed stopped increasing in 2005. If you want to show there's a different trend, then you need multiple data points and compare the recent trend with the longer term trend to see if they're significantly different.
  - sliken 11y ago
    Right, lies, damn lies, and statistics. You could pick data points to make either case. However if you plot transistor density, performance, clock speed, flops/watt, or other metric people attribute to moore's law you'll find the curve isn't holding. Improvements aren't stopping, but aren't doubling every 18 months either. Take for instance 3 generations of intel chips (Sandy Bridge, Ivy bridge and Haswell), Nvidia GPUs, or Arm chips. Sure a new feature might do encryption, floating point, or some unusual graphic feature twice as well, but that's small fraction of the normal use case for that chip. It's gotten so bad that nvidia often just renamed the chip, not actually revising the silicon between generations. Arm's new 64-bit generation of CPUS (cortex a53 and a57) aren't improving much at all over last years arm cores. Intel's new GPUs (one of the most parallel friendly workloads) aren't much better than 2 generations ago. Compare the best of the HD6000 intel GPUs to the old HD4000 2 genrations ago. So by exactly what metric can support the idea that Moore's law isn't dead? Clockspeed? Performance? Transistor budget? Number of cores? What today (april 2015) is 8 times better than 4.5 years ago?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
rgbrenner 11y ago
Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 Score: 24601 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2699+v3+%40+2.30GHz&id=2366 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2699+...
MikusR 11y ago
Single thread PassMark of i7-5930K is 2070.
Aldo_MX 11y ago
Not a fair comparison, you are comparing a single-threaded benchmark vs a multi-threaded one, most software today is still single-threaded (unfortunately).
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
That i7 has 6 cores. So all things being equal 13,638/6 = 2,273 PassMark score per core. Considering the FX-57 is single core, we're really comparing 731 to 2,273, which is about 3x the performance per core in TEN YEARS! Power usage is more impressive and the ability to create and sell multi-core CPU's certainly is, but shoving more and more cores into chip is cheating. Its clear we've hit some wall here and the only way to keep up with performance demand is keep making chips with lots of mediocre cores. Moore's law is dead. No biggie. It happened and no one noticed and those who did, didn't seem to care.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Power usage is more impressive and the ability to create and sell multi-core CPU's certainly is, but shoving more and more cores into chip is cheating. No, its not. Shoving more components into a single IC is what Moore's Law is about. Performance per core was one manifestation of that, but a "core" isn't the fundamental unit the Law addresses.
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    On a practical level it certainly matters for single threaded applications. They're just not benefiting like they should. Formally, Moore's law is just about transistor density not performance, so this is all academic. Historically, density was tied to performance. That's just not true anymore and hasn't been for at least a decade.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > Formally, Moore's law is just about transistor density not performance Formally, it was about number of components per integrated circuit, not density of components (though related observations about density and performance were made very early on, and the 18 month, rather than two year, version actually is about performance, but wasn't from Moore.) > Historically, density was tied to performance. Its still tied to overall performance (computations performable b the chip in a given period of time). Its not tied to per core (i.e., single-threaded) performance when the larger number of components is divided among multiple cores, and that does make it harder to make full use of the available performance in some applications. But that doesn't mean Moore's Law is dead, it just means that more programming skills (possibly, outsourced to the creators of better programming languages/tools) are needed to fully take advantage of the available performance.

by phaemon 11y ago

The fastest CPU in 2005 was (I think) the mighty AMD Athlon 64 FX-57, which PassMark rates at: 731. Meanwhile, in 2015, we have the Intel Core i7-5930K which scores: 13,638.

Someone 11y ago

Ten years is over six of Moore's law 18 month periods, so that 'should' give a factor of over 64 (ignoring the difference between transistor density and speed) Your numbers show a speed up of less than 20.

phaemon 11y ago
> so that 'should' give a factor of over 64 No, that's not how trends work. You can't establish a trend from just two data points. And, given a trend, you can't just pick two points and say they should be so far apart. The only way that would work is if all the data points were very close to the trendline. And the only way that would happen is if CPU development happened very smoothly; which it doesn't. You have spurts of performance increase as new architectures are released. The only thing I was showing with those two figures was that it's clearly not true that speed stopped increasing in 2005. If you want to show there's a different trend, then you need multiple data points and compare the recent trend with the longer term trend to see if they're significantly different.
- sliken 11y ago
  Right, lies, damn lies, and statistics. You could pick data points to make either case. However if you plot transistor density, performance, clock speed, flops/watt, or other metric people attribute to moore's law you'll find the curve isn't holding. Improvements aren't stopping, but aren't doubling every 18 months either. Take for instance 3 generations of intel chips (Sandy Bridge, Ivy bridge and Haswell), Nvidia GPUs, or Arm chips. Sure a new feature might do encryption, floating point, or some unusual graphic feature twice as well, but that's small fraction of the normal use case for that chip. It's gotten so bad that nvidia often just renamed the chip, not actually revising the silicon between generations. Arm's new 64-bit generation of CPUS (cortex a53 and a57) aren't improving much at all over last years arm cores. Intel's new GPUs (one of the most parallel friendly workloads) aren't much better than 2 generations ago. Compare the best of the HD6000 intel GPUs to the old HD4000 2 genrations ago. So by exactly what metric can support the idea that Moore's law isn't dead? Clockspeed? Performance? Transistor budget? Number of cores? What today (april 2015) is 8 times better than 4.5 years ago?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

rgbrenner 11y ago

Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 Score: 24601 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2699+v3+%40+2.30GHz&id=2366 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2699+...

MikusR 11y ago

Single thread PassMark of i7-5930K is 2070.

Aldo_MX 11y ago

Not a fair comparison, you are comparing a single-threaded benchmark vs a multi-threaded one, most software today is still single-threaded (unfortunately).

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

That i7 has 6 cores. So all things being equal 13,638/6 = 2,273 PassMark score per core. Considering the FX-57 is single core, we're really comparing 731 to 2,273, which is about 3x the performance per core in TEN YEARS! Power usage is more impressive and the ability to create and sell multi-core CPU's certainly is, but shoving more and more cores into chip is cheating. Its clear we've hit some wall here and the only way to keep up with performance demand is keep making chips with lots of mediocre cores. Moore's law is dead. No biggie. It happened and no one noticed and those who did, didn't seem to care.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Power usage is more impressive and the ability to create and sell multi-core CPU's certainly is, but shoving more and more cores into chip is cheating. No, its not. Shoving more components into a single IC is what Moore's Law is about. Performance per core was one manifestation of that, but a "core" isn't the fundamental unit the Law addresses.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  On a practical level it certainly matters for single threaded applications. They're just not benefiting like they should. Formally, Moore's law is just about transistor density not performance, so this is all academic. Historically, density was tied to performance. That's just not true anymore and hasn't been for at least a decade.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Formally, Moore's law is just about transistor density not performance Formally, it was about number of components per integrated circuit, not density of components (though related observations about density and performance were made very early on, and the 18 month, rather than two year, version actually is about performance, but wasn't from Moore.) > Historically, density was tied to performance. Its still tied to overall performance (computations performable b the chip in a given period of time). Its not tied to per core (i.e., single-threaded) performance when the larger number of components is divided among multiple cores, and that does make it harder to make full use of the available performance in some applications. But that doesn't mean Moore's Law is dead, it just means that more programming skills (possibly, outsourced to the creators of better programming languages/tools) are needed to fully take advantage of the available performance.