I miss Moore's law

[jelwell]

 
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

 
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]

Don't blame the hardware, blame the software.

Bloated OS, shoddy coding practices.  Poor Quality Assurance.

All contribute.

^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.

[ark_ader]

Actually we will see devices get smaller and one die.  I was an Intel customer until I purchased an A10 processor.  The speed and cost made the chip more affordable, especially since most of the work I undertake is virtual.  Now that doesn't mean much at the moment, but when you see similar chips being manufactured into the latest consoles it makes you think of a bigger picture.

I believe technology will merge and it will be the usual suspects competing on a particular OS say Android - Arm or Atom while serving the console appliances.  I have declared this before and it will come to reality that the PC will be the dominate platform, tablets second and console third in that particular order.

The chip and OS will dominate the market, the software will be standardized and be cost effective.  Who likes porting code anyway?  Yes each machine or entity will have its merits but that is up to the consumer to decide.

  Waste, manufacturing costs will be reduced and eventually there will be only one kid on the block, and the software will the deciding factor.  We only have so much resources and everything will go green.

So Moore's law will come to an end.  Better save up for that upgrade.

[lilshawn]

but when you see similar chips being manufactured into the latest consoles it makes you think of a bigger picture

yes, with both the XO and PS4 using x86 type technology, it won't be long before you can find emulators for these systems because you won't have to do a bunch of shitcoding to make it work

[Lilwolf]

btw, I just upgraded my 2.8ghz c2q to an i7 quad 3.8ghz.  The speed is jump is more then just the increase in clock speed.  The i7 is faster as the same clock speed to the old c2q ect.

[Cakemeister]

but when you see similar chips being manufactured into the latest consoles it makes you think of a bigger picture

yes, with both the XO and PS4 using x86 type technology, it won't be long before you can find emulators for these systems because you won't have to do a bunch of shitcoding to make it work

That's the current direction of development by the Maximo G+ folks.

[cigardude]

Just because things are at 2-3ghz does not mean that they are not getting significantly faster. For example, we run engineering simulations all day long. We've gone from Dell Precision T3500 workstations to T3600 workstations. Our simulations now run at 1/3 the time. Just because there is a Pentium running at 3Ghz and an I7 processor running at 3Ghz, I can assure you that the I7 is way faster. You need to look at over all system speed, not just the processor. Believe it or not, there are a lot of bottle necks on that motherboard as stated previously.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

While the "clock speeds" do not vary that much, the speed doubles or triples depending on the processor.

[lcmgadgets]

Another issue I understand is, literally, the clock. Way back, the early computers were a lot less reliable than the 1's now, & it made sense to have a system clock that forced the cpu to literally stop, check all its work, correct errors, & continue. Now error correction isn't nearly as needed, & the clock is become a limiting factor. Intel started xperimenting with clock less chips a few years ago, & found they could make significant speed leaps by eliminating it. Problem is, all the architecture up to now has been based around that clock, & to change it now...

Another way to make a huge leap in computing power/speed: analog.

[lilshawn]

there are TONS of bottlenecks in computers, and depending on how old they are, can vary wildly.

a 3GHZ cpu connecting to DDR ram at only 200mhz

VS

a 3 ghz CPU connecting to DDR3 ram at 225mhz

now 25mhz doesn't sound all that fast does it? But it's 0.4 gigatranfers per second per second VS 1.8 gigatranfers a second...nearly 5 times the data.

of course this is modern enough the the memory comptroller is built into the CPU, back in the day the CPU had to connect to the memory (SDRAM) through the Northbridge (which often ran 10 or more times slower than the CPU)

for example a 1000 mhz cpu connecting to a FSB of 250 mhz northbridge to a bus at 133mhz to ram... by comparison modern DDR3 (1800) transfers data 14 times faster than SDRAM.

manufacturers have been working for years to increase the bus speeds and figured it out that it was best to integrate things into the CPU since that was the fastest thing in there. The Athlon64 marked the introduction of an integrated memory controller being incorporated into the processor itself allowing the processor to directly access and handle memory, negating the need for a traditional northbridge to do so. Intel followed suit in 2008 with the release of its Core i series CPUs and the X58 platform with PCH. Now your CPU handles memory and even more recently video and PCIe functions because the data rates required are getting bigger and bigger...you can't afford to be "waiting for the bus". Even rudimentary tasks normally handled by the "super IO" chip have been handed off to the southbridge. hell, some computers don't even do a southbridge anymore and have the northbridge take care of it...or just  eliminate it completely as evidenced by the elimination of such features as serial, parallel, floppy drive ports, ps2 mouse and keyboard connections on some of the newer boards.

So really, processors aren't getting faster per se, the computer as a whole is becoming more efficient since now we don't have to waste 1000's of computer cycles for a slow assed bus to retrieve information from somewhere else.