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Comment by kroltan | Hacker News Reader

8 threads, 8MB cache, 4GHz? Pretty fast, yes. Not the fastest, by far, but are you really arguing that casual web browsing for news viewing (viewing! the stats are not even for page load, but idle) should require top of the line equipment?

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No, I'm saying Moore's Law suggest(s|ed) that every 18 months your chip's speed relative to current offerings is about half what it was. And this old chip has had four cycles of that exponential decay.

I just built a 12 core system I would describe as "pretty fast." A high end consumer desktop these days is 16 cores. A couple years from now, that will be considered "pretty fast."

Actually, Moore's law says nothing about speed, just the number of transistors you can stuff into the thing. Plus progress has been leveling off.

The only reason anyone ever cared transistor count is because that is a rough proxy for measuring speed.

It hasn't been for a long, long time now.

Moore's paper was about VLSI manufacturing. He certainly cared about transistor count. He didn't once touch on how those transistors get to be used.

Why did he care about transistor count?

VLSI manufacturing makes chips, made of transistors. It does not sell end products. The end products are a concept that their clients care about, not them. The same way a tree farmer does not spend his days thinking about toilet paper, even though that's what he is actually helping create. Instead, he thinks about trees, and how to best grow them.

Make no mistake, he knew he worked on the production of CPUs and memories, it was just not his focus. Also, he certainly cared about switching time, but his observation was about transistor count, not switching time.

Why did their clients care about transistor count?

Ever since the arrival of multi-core CPUs chip speed should probably be considered a dual number: max single core throughput and total throughput.

Also, my over 6 year old DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) CPU[0] is still plenty fast. It’s almost everything around it I have since upgraded (NVMe SSD, RAM, audio interface, video card) to keep overall system performance high.

[0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/77780/i...

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