[Ace17]

"We’re so spoiled today. Every week a newer, faster processor is released. Hardware gets cheaper and we can just throw more chips at the problem."

I've been running a 3.5GHz CPU (with 4 HT cores) for nearly 10 years.

That's a lot of weeks. Surely, today, I should be able to buy a 10GHz CPU, right? :D

[otabdeveloper4]

Yeah, the guy is living in some alternate reality. E.g., here on planet Earth low- and mid-range consumer laptops have been getting slower, not faster over the years. (Yeah, they're lighter and more power-efficient, but that's orthogonal.)

Same deal with servers: AWS and Azure are dog-slow compared to the on-premises server hardware we'd have before "the cloud".

[tester34]

>Yeah, the guy is living in some alternate reality.

How so?

(I'm talking from desktop perspective)

I'm following tech news and it feels like there's always news about AMD releasing new stuff or Intel trying to catch up

I bought my 8 cores CPU for +-125$ of _my_currency_ year ago which was unbelievable like 3? years ago. Meanwhile I'm still far behind of what's on the edge.

Also nowadays I can spend like 60$ of _my_currency to get insanely fast NVMe M2 disks, so things are cheap nowadays I guess.

[icedchai]

Maybe if you stick with Intel. My AMD "budget" laptop (Ryzen 4500U, 6 cores) blows away a much more expensive Intel laptop I bought only 2 years ago. It was less than half the price.

[yitchelle]

I think that this is wrong perspective. The computers that you and I are using right now on our desks does not get slower. A CPU running 3.6GHz will still be running at 3.6GHz in a few years time. The moving target is software.

[numlock86]

You pretty much summed up the major misconception of how CPUs work (and get faster) these days. It's not about cores or clocking speed.

[ZephyrBlu]

Can you elaborate on how CPUs work then? I'm curious what matters if clock speed and core count doesn't.

[mhh__]

(All benchmarks mentioned are from Geekbench, I don't know how methodologically sound they are).

I don't know which CPU you're actually using, but taking the i7 990x (3.5GHz, 6 cores etc. - $1k back in '11) as a reference, single threaded performance at the cutting edge has increased by roughly a factor of 2 to 3 - 7GHz enough for you?

The AMD 5950X is currently the meanest desktop chip on the market, across multithreaded workloads it's something like a factor of 6.5 faster than the i7. Sure it's got 12 more cores, but it does all that for less power at boost than the i7's nominal TDP.

Include modern memory and storage into the equation, and we've come quite a long way, and it's only going to get better now that Intel are desperate, AMD are finally back, and Apple have demonstrated ARM is good enough to displace x86.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Modern processors have not just increased in core count, but also in how efficient their pipelining, parallelizing, and instruction reordering is. We used to measure CPUs by cycles/instruction, but modern CPUs have inverted that relationship and now we can execute several instructions per cycle, so each cycle is actually doing more even if we can't squeeze more cycles in per second.

[ajuc]

You can buy 32 core 3.5 GHz CPU :)

[otabdeveloper4]

That's orthogonal. You could always scale performance by throwing money at it in the past; the issue here is the promise of "free" performance improvements just by virtue of the natural upgrade cycle.

[snthueoa]

Are you suggesting that processor speed is solely a function of clock speed?

[314]

Given the improvements in IPC over ten years it is not that far off. If your workload can spread over more cores then that level was exceeded long ago.