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antisthenes
ido
"general computer responsiveness" at this point is 100% on software/OS - QNX for example was perfectly responsive in the 90s on Pentium II class hardware (and you can probably find earlier examples with weaker CPUs like BeOS on early PPC, but these were just the first to come to my mind - someone will probably chime in below with Amiga anecdotes or something).
I refuse to believe at current high end intel/amd levels (i7-9 & ryzen 7-9) & even mid-range that lack of responsiveness is due to the CPU rather than windows/mac.
antisthenes
> I refuse to believe at current high end intel/amd levels (i7-9 & ryzen 7-9) & even mid-range that lack of responsiveness is due to the CPU rather than windows/mac.
You are right, of course, in that the fault lies with software. But holding the software as constant, the only way to improve responsiveness is to up your core speed and IPC.
It's not as if the average user can email Microsoft of the Chrome browser team and ask them to make the OS/Browser more responsive for their older hardware. But they _can_ go to the store and buy a faster CPU, most of the time.
The situation was probably reversed a few decades ago, when hardware was actually expensive and multi-core was not a thing.
rraghur
I think the responsiveness problem will be tackled by specialized memory controllers like where the new gaming consoles are headed
lostmsu
Sure it was. Back then screens had 16+ times less pixels (multiply it by 2-8 for text mode), Linux (the kernel) source code was still relatively small, and the games played had 10 2D levels of a few million pixels each.
ido
I'm not talking about games, I'm talking general computer use responsiveness. the difference in computing resources between a pentium II @ 266mhz and modern-day CPUs is much bigger than 16x and even back then win95 was a lot slower than it should have been (we were saying basically the same thing - "why is this 266mhz PII not feeling any faster than my old 8mhz amiga?").
Again the "poster boy" for responsive interaction is probably BeOS - the original BeBox used dual ppc 603 CPUs at 66mhz: if you consider IPC, Mhz & number of cores a modern CPU probably has 1000x the computation power at its disposal & RAM is also generally 1000x more plentiful (we have as many GBs as we used to have MBs back then). I'll bet with GPUs the difference is even bigger.
Sohcahtoa82
16 times less pixels, but our systems are now literally over 50 times faster, and that's only considering clock speeds of a single core and ignores IPC improvements.
andrewjl
> but tons of useful software is still bottlenecked by single core speed
It's interesting to see approaches like Apple's where more and more of computationally heavy work is moved onto what are essentially special purpose purpose ASICs (I think you can generously expand the definition to even include GPUs). Specific examples include video decoding, graphics, and increasingly ML computation. Once those things become "free" what is left? I'd say mostly just many layers of abstractions atop basic computation.
As more and more software stacks become ergonomic w.r.t. multithreading & multiple execution contexts, single core becomes less of a bottleneck. IMO that's the ultimate solution to the hard physical constraints of Moore's Law. Short of a new type of compute substrate.
thedudeabides5
Anyone have up to date data on the progress of Moore's law through today? All the stuff on google looks like it taps out in 2015
https://www.google.com/search?q=moore+law+&tbm=isch&ved=2ahU...
blululu
One thing that is maybe helpful to consider in the modern era is that Moore's law's meaning has unraveled as we have reached smaller scales (hence the basic arguments over what it even means).
Originally the law relates to the transistor density of an IC, but this was strongly correlated with Power Consumption, Clock Speed, and a bunch of other metrics. As we reach smaller scales these parameters are no longer tightly coupled. I recall seeing a plot to the effect that Power Efficiency tapped out at 14 nm. Likewise clock speed has not been increasing at the original clip for the better part of a decade (it went up ~50% in 10 years, which in any other area of engineering would be astounding, but I could sure use a 32GHZ processor). Anyway, having trade offs makes things more interesting and perhaps we are going to see an era with more cleverness chip architecture soon.
rbanffy
32 GHz would be fun. We'd have multiple clock pulses flowing around because the chip is larger than the clock's wavelength.
And I'm not counting the circuit paths - this would be on a straight line of copper.
gameswithgo
The progress of Moore's Law no longer exists. It was a very specific claim that we have not managed to achieve for a while. People often use the phrase "Moore's Law" just to refer to the continuing shrinkage of transistors, though. Which I think is what you mean.
ksec
We are no longer doubling / 2x every 2 years. And hasn't been so for a few years now. But we are getting 1.8x. So not too bad.
People will like to show you graphs, especially with 10 - 50 years time scale. Well you will still see a straight line, because only the end tip of that graph is beginning to curve.
Assuming a perfect execution, TSMC will get you ~1.8x transistor density improvement every 2 years all the way till 2030.
You may also want to read [1] David Kanter on Transistor Density. But TD;LR not all transistor shrink at the same ratio, 1.8x is the best case scenario.
https://www.realworldtech.com/transistor-count-flawed-metric...
Veedrac
Density on the leading node (CPU & GPU graphs): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NNOqbJfcISFyMd0EsSrh...
I've also got an NVIDIA performance graph, since GPUs scale well with transistors: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dukdlqkh-zPkhmjUVuUL...
lmeyerov
I did a variant for GPU land around AWS instance hour purchasing power for GPU TFLOPS + GPU RAM over the last 10 years: https://twitter.com/lmeyerov/status/1232937998464901120
For context, the last entry is the T4 (aws g4dn), which is 12nm
Not exactly doubling every two years, but not far off. Moore's Law is dead, long live Moore's Law!
rockostrich
5 nm node products are being released to consumers this year so we're still on track. I think at this point the next node is always questionable because it takes a pretty big breakthrough in manufacturing techniques, resist chemistry, and node design to shave off another nanometer.
gameswithgo
"Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years"
We are not on track, haven't been on track.
bryan0
Do you have graphs for this? a quick search shows that at least in some sectors they're still doubling every 2 years
https://www.icinsights.com/news/bulletins/Transistor-Count-T...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#/media/File:M...
https://medium.com/predict/moores-law-is-alive-and-well-eaa4...
jjcon
The 5nm nodes being released aren’t actually 5nm though right? That’s just the branding/marketing associated with them from what I’ve seen.
hyperpallium2
transistors/mm^2 seems like a harder-to-game metric, and more in line with Moore's Law.
Though it was "number of components per integrated circuit" https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
So... larger chips areas could continue it... I've thought that huge wafers, at slower clocks, would make sense. In a PC, tablet or even phone, there is plenty of physical room.
Not sure if the barrier is technical or just present usage and economics.
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Nanometer wars became marketing bullshit pretty much around the shift down from 22nm to 14nm and lower (2013-ish and later)
At this point, we should just be looking at IPC improvements at the same frequency/voltage and power consumption to see if there are any improvements.
And yes, sure, more cores are nice, but tons of useful software is still bottlenecked by single core speed. So is general computer responsiveness.