They tried that -- the Pentium 4. The key design goal was to push clock speed as high as possible, and they used some crazy tricks, like 30-some-stage pipelines, a really long instruction scheduling loop with a pretty long lookahead, a double-pumped ALU with staggered 16-bit half-adds, etc. Fascinating from a microarchitecture perspective, but the big lesson was that high clock speeds sacrifice efficiency. The tricks needed to get there cause a lot of performance outliers/bad cases too -- e.g. the instruction scheduling replay system on lookahead conflicts was notorious for "tornados" which would kill IPC. And the branch prediction of the day was somewhat suboptimal for the pipeline lengths involved.

> Why are we stuck in 2006 era CPU singe core performance?

We aren't! The core microarchitecture teams at Intel and their competitors have made a lot of incremental progress -- Intel gets about 15% single-thread performance per generation, for example. No one is evilly scheming and holding back from turning a knob higher. There's just a lot of really hard engineering. Clock speed has topped out due to power limitations so we're at the point of looking for better branch prediction algorithms, cache replacement algorithms, and lots of little tricks everywhere to optimize bad cases. It's hard work (this was my job for a bit).

I'd recommend looking at, e.g., the proceedings of ISCA and MICRO conferences in the 2000-2006 timeframe -- this was when the industry and associated academia figured out that chasing clock speed was a losing battle after a certain point.

Many important things which affect performance have been stagnant for a very long time, especially cache size and RAM latency. But there's been steady progress in raw CPU power, coupled with a significant reduction in TDP.

I'm asking because I recently "upgraded" my desktop to a cheap westmere 6 core xeon [1] as in most benchmarks it is competitive with recent i7s.

[1] x5670 @3ghz, but should easily overclock well into the 4ghz range.

Edit: autocorrect

https://browser.primatelabs.com

Useful information if your workload is single threaded.

Note that their usage of the word browser is nothing to do with www browsers.

Still, even looking at the scores for less broken sub benchmarks, like (possibly) lua and dijkstra show a %50 increase in performance from Westmere to Skylake for the same frequency, which is more than I was expecting. And skylake should potentially clock much higher although I believe the top is currently still 4ghz.

Of course for anything that can take advantage AVX2 (or AVX3 for xeons) skylake would smoke the old xeon.

edit: reword

See Hinton et al., "The microarchitecture of the Pentium 4 processor" [1] for all the nifty details -- pp 8-9, and Fig 7 in particular.

[1] http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/koren/ece568/papers/Pentium4.pd...

From section 2 of this:

https://gmplib.org/~tege/x86-timing.pdf

"Pentium F0-F2 can sustain 3 add r, i per cycle for -32768 <= i <= 32767, but for larger immediate operands it can sustain only about 3/2 per cycle."

While this might not make sense at the surface (the next stage of the pipeline won't be ready for the data a half clock cycle earlier), you can minimize logic area by doing 2 quick 16 bit operations. Additionally, for some operations that have dependent instructions, for example a super scalar processor executing two integer instructions at once, if you have an ADD that depends on another ADD, you can forward the result from the first cycle on the first ALU to the second cycle on the second, although I'm not sure if this is actually done.

Another case where this is useful is if the result of an ADD operation needs to be used on a LOAD instruction earlier, you can forward the result a half clock cycle sooner.

Because that's physically impractical (if not impossible) with today's technology. Intel themselves actually have a good article[0] on the topic. Besides, there's way more to CPU performance than clock speed—today's Intel CPUs are several times faster than the Penitum 4, for instance, even at lower frequencies.

> @nVidia: how about thinking about affordable high end GPUs? The GPUs got 400% more expensive since 2011.

What are you talking about? GPU performance is plateauing a little bit, but the cards are only getting cheaper and more energy efficient, especially the high-end ones. Both Nvidia and AMD have announced new high-end cards coming soon that will give you the performance of the current high-end cards (Titan X and Fury X) at a little over half the price. Edit: Apparently they won't be that much cheaper than previous generations, but certainly within the grasp of any enthusiast or professional who really wants/needs them.

Plus, isn't "affordable high end" kind of an oxymoron? "High end" is almost by definition not affordable for most people.

[0]: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/02/19/why-has-cp...

The 980 TI I'm not sure is the best comparison to a GTX 580. It was intentionally a very expensive ultra-high end card. The GTX 590 debuted at $700.

There does seem to be a problem with prices being ridiculously high in most non-US regions, though.

I don't know where you've been but GPU competition between nvidia and AMD has been pretty healthy for the last few years, and AMDs specifically have been quite affordable. (That's not even taking into account they easily paid for themselves with Litecoin mining at one point.) It's only CPU competition that has been dead, but that's been the case ever since the Core line came out. (I guess you could count ARM too for low-end CPU competition, but both Intel and ARM can actually afford to lose that market entirely as their businesses are propped up by other things.)

NVIDIA held the upper hand with GK110 (780/Titan), then AMD dropped the 290X. This forced NVIDIA to readjust their prices and release the 780 Ti as an interim measure, but they held onto their lead position. Then NVIDIA started with the Maxwell series, which drastically improved both performance and efficiency. AMD tried to respond to the Titan X with the Fury X, but NVIDIA cut the legs out from under them by releasing the 980 Ti. Now once again AMD is behind the performance curve - NVIDIA has staked out the high-end space with the 1080 and the midrange with the 1070, and AMD is stuck in the low-end market with the RX480 until NVIDIA can get GP106 out.

AMD's response to the 1080 is going to be the Vega 10 chip, and unfortunately it's unlikely to be released before Q4 2016 at the earliest (more likely Q1 or Q2 2017). NVIDIA already has GP102 coming down the pipe, which is going to be a Titan/1080 Ti, and they'll drop that when they feel it's necessary to spoil AMD's sales.

That's the story of AMD and NVIDIA recently. AMD has put out some cards that were good value for the money - both the 7950/7970 and 290/290X have been very long-lived performers (and will likely continue to perform well thanks to DX12). But they haven't taken the top since 2012, all they can do at this point is force some price reductions. Like it or not they aren't a serious competitor in the GPU space any more than they are in the CPU space. They are a budget choice, not a serious contender.

There is also a rumor about AMD pushing Vega forward to october to release it around the new Battlefield (I doubt it, but it would certainly be nice).

Wouldn't other semiconductor materials allow higher clock speeds and it's just that the switch would be difficult to do incrementally?

Short answer is "no", but other materials may allow smaller manufacturing technologies. "Incrementally" isn't really a factor - every die-shrink is basically a new manufacturing process.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/intel-forges-ahead-to...

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/ibm-unveils-industrys...

nVidia got their bets right with investing on uses other than gaming for their GPUs now they're eating AMD/ATI in the deep learning field

Affordable and High End are rarely on the same phrase, so there's your answer to when nVidia is going to do that

Example: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Pentiu...

Other examples: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel,264-18.html

Not that this matter for normal cars.

That said, I suppose this differs depending on wether or not you think of the gearbox as a part of the engine (CPU) or not.

... but nothing compares, nothing has prepared me, for the sheer awesomeness, of these two links. I now must store the PDFs in a safe repository with GoogleCalendar note to re-read them frequently :->

IMO the only issue is commercial pressure killing integration. Until Vulkan GPUs were underutilized. Audio drivers lying about hardware capabilities. Software layers ever shifting. Absurd use cases: ads invaded html5, half accelerated html video....