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Comment by tasssko | Hacker News Reader

To me it feels as though the last decade and a half computational power has not grown vertically. Instead Intel and AMD have grown computational power horizontally (i.e adding more cores). I'm looking at the difference the M1 has had on compute performance as a sign X86 strayed.

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It has also grown substantially vertically: single-core speeds keep going up (about 10x from a decade and a half ago), even as core count increases. (and M1 is not substantially faster than the top x86 cores, the remarkable thing is how power efficient it is at those speeds).

This was state of the art 15 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentsfield_(microprocessor) Modern processors are nowhere near 10x faster single core. Maybe 4x.

If you take into account performance/watt you do get 10x or better.

The 3.4ghz P4 was released 2004 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_proc...

If the trend had continued we would have 1500Ghz cores by now.

Clock speed != single-threaded performance. Clock speeds plateaued a long time ago, single threaded performance is still improving exponentially (by being able to execute multiple instructions in an instruction stream in parallel, as well as execute the same instructions in less clock cycles), though the exponent approximately halved around 2004 (if the trend had continued we would be at about a 100-500x improvement by now).

https://github.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-trend-data

Hard to say it's still "exponential"...what do you think the current constant doubling period is now?

Here's the single thread raw data from that repo. If you take into account clock speed increase (which, as you agree, have plateaued) we're looking at maybe a 2x increase in instructions per clock for conventional int (not vectorized) workloads.

Is there even another 2x IPC increase possible? At any time scale?

https://github.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-trend-data/blob/m...

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