On 07/11/2017 11:12 AM, codephantom wrote:
On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 08:53:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
No, the reason they don't improve is consumers don't need the
performance.
I don't agree. Consumers would welcome more performance - and many of us
'need' it too.
But cpu's have hit the heat barrier, and so manufacturers tend to focus
on more cores, better caching algorithms, and such...
but I am sure that consumers would find a 10GHz quad core processor far
more useful than a 4Ghz 24 core one.
Then you have the challenges of redesigning programming languages and
software development methodologies to take better advantage of the
multi-core thing...
There is also the problem of no real competition against Intel, so real
innovation is not occuring as rapidly as it once did.
What we really need, is to get rid of that heat barrier - which means
lots and lots of money (potentially billions) into new research... and
without competition, why should Intel bother? They can just do a few
minor tweaks here and there, increment a number, and call the tweaked i7
..the i9.
Not quite, but along the right line of thinking IMO.
Speed wise we have well and truly hit the limit of what we can do with
silicon.
The speed improvements today are not the same kind done 20 years ago.
Today's speed improvements come from changing and making what
instructions run cheaper.
Consumers most definitely would benefit from higher number of cores even
if they are slower. Why? Two reasons. First of all common programs like
web browsers tend to use a LOT of threads. Which would mean less context
switching over all (quite expensive and slow). Second most people do not
max out their RAM both speed and quantity wise. RAM that matches the CPU
clock speed is very expensive when comparing against high end CPU's and
RAM is the real bottle neck today. Most people never get close to using
up a CPU to its maximum capacity, its sitting idle a good bit of the time.
Intel has competition, every heard of AMD and ARM? Intel has made a lot
of changes to their strategy in the last 10-30 years e.g. being more
energy efficient because of ARM and AMD64 (with micro ops to implement it).
I am quite surprised that Intel even created i9 actually, it just wasn't
required. Its like as if they took their Xeon lines, removed a bunch of
features and only based it on the higher end ones.
Remember Xeon = non-consumer (so you get e.g. reliability and
performance along with all the new features) and i-series = cheap
consumer products.
