This news isn't a huge surprise, but it still saddens me. It seems that I started getting into x86 hardware just as the CPU battle/Moore's law started dying.
My first real build had an Athlon 64 X2, and back then I foolishly assumed that the closeness of the competition was going to last (this was just before Conroe/Core 2 launched). I decided to upgrade to a Core 2 Quad a few years later, and an Ivy Bridge chip about a year ago. None of these upgrades, however, feel quite as potent as that first time when I switched from a Prescott Celeron to that Athlon 64 X2.
Sure, synthetic CPU benchmarks show that Moore's law isn't quite dead yet, but singlethreaded performance just is not the battleground it was a decade ago. I feel that somewhere along the line, people stopped pushing the envelope. Have we gotten to the point where people have run out of ideas to push their hardware with? Perhaps it's because physical limitations are being reached. Still, I can't help but fantasize about what the world would be like if the x86 market were as competitive as it were a decade ago.
This is just a common misconception over what Moore said, and what his law means. Hint: it has nothing to do with the clock speed or even directly the prefromace of your CPUs.
Moore's law is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. Which is still very much the case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moore%27s_law_graph.svg
Improvements on synthetic benchmarks but real wolrd stagnation that we are no longer cpu throughput bound. Trig functions have improved from 90 ticks ti so.ething like 14 ticks. Getting an SSD mightatter more then 2 extra cores.The CPU is no longer the engine it is a piston.
It's not even close to dying, it's just not focused on faster cores or x86 alone. Now is the time to parallelize everything, over x86/ARM CPUs and/or GPUs.
My first real build had an Athlon 64 X2, and back then I foolishly assumed that the closeness of the competition was going to last (this was just before Conroe/Core 2 launched). I decided to upgrade to a Core 2 Quad a few years later, and an Ivy Bridge chip about a year ago. None of these upgrades, however, feel quite as potent as that first time when I switched from a Prescott Celeron to that Athlon 64 X2.
Sure, synthetic CPU benchmarks show that Moore's law isn't quite dead yet, but singlethreaded performance just is not the battleground it was a decade ago. I feel that somewhere along the line, people stopped pushing the envelope. Have we gotten to the point where people have run out of ideas to push their hardware with? Perhaps it's because physical limitations are being reached. Still, I can't help but fantasize about what the world would be like if the x86 market were as competitive as it were a decade ago.