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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I am not particularly excited for the next round of Moore's Law on CPUs. What else are we going to be able to accomplish if CPUs get twice as fast?

GPUs, however, are exciting. ChatGPT is cool now. Real time voice recognition is cool. But can they run on your phone? Seems like people will probably make improvements on the algorithmic side to these things, but we could really use improvements on the GPU side as well. When GPUs are twice as powerful as they are today, I think we'll notice.

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> What else are we going to be able to accomplish if CPUs get twice as fast?

Replace GPUs with CPUs. The future is CPUs with built in tensor cores, which is the way Apple is going.

Right. At one point floating point was a co-processor. Then it became technically feasible and supported by business cases so it was included in all chips.

It's only a matter of time before tensor cores are ubiquitous

That won't happen anytime soon. GPU performance growth has outstripped CPU growth for well over a decade and that gap is likely to only widen in future.

What excites me about about ChatGPT is the fact that you can take a lot of data and a huge model and make it do something cool. Right now, "making it do something cool" costs tens of millions of dollars. If that cost can be brought down to the 10s of thousands of dollars, I think we'd start to see really mind blowing applications.

>Seems like people will probably make improvements on the algorithmic side to these things

I feel like this is an understatement. Improvements in compilers and hardware have made software developers incredibly lazy.

> What else are we going to be able to accomplish if CPUs get twice as fast?

I think we are leaving the era of "twice as fast" and entering the era of "half the power" meaning half the heat and twice the battery life. Wearables will continue to gain in popularity as they become more convenient. AR will be made possible by powerful, low watt SOCs.

I'm really excited for the future of NVMe, storage nowadays is hundreds of times faster than it was at the turn of the century and I think that'll open up a lot of opportunities

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