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I miss Moore's law
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jelwell:
 :soapbox:
I get that Moore's law is still "working", and it's not technically a law. I setup my cabinet over 7 years ago now. I forget exactly what's in it. But I think it's an Athlon 3400, which is about 2.2GHz. I thought by now I'd have a hand me down cpu that could run all the games Mame supported back in 2005. Well that obviously hasn't happened. CPUs have barely added 2GHz to their clock speed. They've spent all that doubling transistor space on multicores and other features. And so it's 2013 and I'm debating buying a top of the line cpu, or waiting countless more years for some better clock speed gains.

Unfortunately you can see from graphs like these, that 2005 was when clock speed gains leveled off:
http://cpudb.stanford.edu/visualize/clock_frequency
http://smoothspan.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/clockspeeds.jpg

 :blah:
Joseph Elwell.
Slippyblade:
The problem is, Moore's Law ran into quantum mechanics.  Sorta.

CPU's literally hit the wall as far as clock speeds.  When you feed a signal into a capacitor, the higher the frequency of the signal, the lower the resistance the capacitor appears.  Think of the traces in a CPU, conductors with an insulator between, you effectively had a capacitance between traces inside the circuit.  The higher the clock frequency, the lower the resistance of that capacitor.  You basically reach a point where you might as well solder all the pins of your CPU together.

Also, a lot of the problem you see today is with OS and application bloat.  If you were to load up Windows 3.1 on a modern system, assuming you could, it'd run like greased lightning on crack.
lilshawn:
i wouln't go so far as to say that, Moors law is really just an observation and not so much "law". transistors ARE doubling, it's just with the physical limitations of the current transistor scale, in order to go faster, we must get smaller, and the technology isn't there yet. so the "doubling" we have been seeing is the release of the multicore, 2,4,6,8 core processors. the speed is still up there (heck the new AMD 9590 8 core easily does 5ghz) we are effectively still "doubling" the transistors, it's just we are using 2x the original amount of transistors for a DUAL core processor.

the main area of issue regarding computers...memory speed. getting info in and out of the processor is a real problem.  DDR3 is only 1333 MT/s. (megatransfers per second) that's a brutal bottle neck for performance. Crucial announced that DDR4 will run at 2133 MT/s. (moors law again :) ) the increase in the speed of memory will result in dual core processors in the 5ghz range while high end 8 (and likely 16 core...moors law yet again) processors will be in the 6 or 7ghz range.

enough of my chatter.

your issue really is with RAM. your athlon system likely runs DDR(400 MT/s) ram. a core 2 duo system with a CPU at 1.8ghz running DDR3 (1333 MT/s) would blast that computer out of the water simply because it can blast info in and out of the RAM at nearly 4x the speed.
ark_ader:
Don't blame the hardware, blame the software.

Bloated OS, shoddy coding practices.  Poor Quality Assurance.

All contribute.
JDFan:

--- Quote from: ark_ader on November 17, 2013, 01:25:44 am ---Don't blame the hardware, blame the software.

Bloated OS, shoddy coding practices.  Poor Quality Assurance.

All contribute.

--- End quote ---
^This --and the CPU manufacturers sidestepping the speed wars and instead focusing on combined processors with CPU\GPU integrated into one die for the tablet\smart phone market slowing development of the desktop processors.
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