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Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

10 years? It has already happened. Consumer chips haven't gotten much better in a decade. Most gains have been applied to power efficiency for mobile use. An unfortunate side effect is the that chip makers are learning that they can milk money for smaller improvements. I doubt we will ever return to the old <2yr Moore's law.

On the upside we might get lucky and some new innovations will come along an give us a quick bump. Tech like optical interconnects, 3D chip manufacturing, memristors, etc.

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Huh? Moore's Law is about transistor density, not clockspeed. It absolutely hasn't paused over the past decade. See here: http://education.mrsec.wisc.edu/SlideShow/images/computer/Mo...

Processors have also gotten significantly more capable over the past decade, and if you don't believe me, go use an Athlon 64 X2 for a bit (the cream of the crop from 2005) and see how that compares to today's processors. Poorly.

And here's a representative comparison if you want to see actual benchmarks that measure real work that processors can perform:

1. THEN: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+64+X2+Dua...

2. NOW: Intel Core i7-5820K http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5820K+...

Note that the modern one is 13 times faster, and came out about nine years later. Sounds like Moore's Law is alive and well to me.

You're comparing a low-end 89W TDP chip with a 219 mm² die to a high-end 140W TDP chip with a 356 mm² die, and even then a lot of the actual improvement is front-loaded in the first few years of those 9 years.

I think the more illustrative comparison is with the i7 920, which came out in 2008. In the intervening 7 years, there's only been a ~160% improvement by the standard given. That's a rate of 23% improvement per year, rather than the 130% per year that your example implies. Most of the improvement from the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ to current CPUs was concentrated in the release of the Nehelem architecture.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7+920+%4...

The i7 920 was an incredible step forward, but progress has stalled since its release.

This is true. However, if you look at the chips in average consumer laptops, I don't think they have increased in performance in line with Moore's Law.

Today's consumers are being sold cheap laptops that often have Celeron and Pentium chips, which are branded versions of the Atom design. Most of them are slower than an Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 from 2007. The big difference is that that had a TDP of 65W where a modern Atom would be more like 8W.

That dramatic reduction in TDP has been driven by ultra-thin laptop designs, which has also affected faster Core designs, especially the 4.5W Core M.

So yes, a lot of consumers are getting laptops that haven't increased dramatically in performance, and may have declined (as rated by Passmark benchmarks (1)). But they are getting thinner laptops with better battery life, and they are paying a lot less for them (maybe $200).

(1) Real-life performance is also affected by things like built-in H264 decoding, hardware acceleration in operating systems etc.

CydeWeys is correct. To quote a previous post of mine:

----------------------

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.

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I really have no idea where this crazy idea that 2005 was the pinnacle of consumer CPU power comes from...

When people say things like that, they usually bemoan the radical slowdown in single-thread performance improvements. For some problems that's all that matters, and the people that have such problems are understandably disappointed.

Moore's law is alive and well (at least for now) for low-power and multicore, but for single-thread desktop-class chips things have slowed down a lot.

>I really have no idea where this crazy idea that 2005 was the pinnacle of consumer CPU power comes from...

As 'tormeh said, single-threaded performance has not improved as much since 2005. For example, the Passmark single-thread rating for the Athlon 64 FX-57[1] is 832 and for the i7-5930K[2] is "only" 2081.

[1] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+64+FX-57

[2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5930K...

To put this in perspective: for the decades before 2005 when performance per price matched 1:1 with transistor price, speeds increased roughly 100x per decade. That's 2^(10/1.5) ~= 102 for an 18 month doubling period.

So between 2005 and 1015, they only increased 2081/832 ~= 2.5. Single-thread performance increase at a given price is effectively dead (for now).

The sad thing about this (that I've been ranting about since around 2000) is that increasing parallel performance is so trivial that small companies like 3dfx were doing it with Voodoo cards back in the mid 90s. It’s only gotten easier since, so now it’s so streamlined that video card companies just keep doubling the number of cores with little deep insight into how to generalize what they are doing. Their monopolization has hurt research into things like using FPGAs for general-purpose parallel computing, and what’s stung perhaps even more than that is being locked into narrow-focus approaches like CUDA and OpenCL.

Increasing serial performance is relatively straightforward. If companies hadn't doubled down on things like caching in the race for more speed, we could have moved to small/exotic chips using rather well-understood materials like Gallium Arsenide. Probably the easiest way to go about this is to reject relying on the clout of big companies. I’d like to see an architecture like MIPS with say a 4-8 stage branch-predicting pipeline and well-understood engineering tradeoffs implemented in a SiGe or graphene processor with on the order of 10,000-100,000 transistors, running above 10 GHz. This isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, because so much has been invested in status quo fabs, but I keep hoping that some of the older fabs might throw their hands up and try retooling with some of this 90s technology rather than going out of business.

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