Re:Why has CPU frequency ceased to grow? (2014)
by wmf on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @02:14PM
(#16432055)
those 64-core CPUs I was promised
The people promising that were crackpots and no one really called them out on it, so that meme got repeated everywhere despite being wrong. Processor vendors can't release a new processor that runs existing apps slower because no one would buy it (not counting monopolistic tactics). And since many existing apps are single-threaded, that means new processors have to at least maintain the same single-threaded performance which means keeping brainiac cores which means you can only afford 6-8 of them. (And arguably there are 64 weak cores in your CPU; they're just in the IGP and you have to program them with OpenCL.)
Go/Rust/Elixir are not so much progress IMO as undoing the negative progress of writing large-scale software in scripting languages.
The people promising that were crackpots and no one really called them out on it, so that meme got repeated everywhere despite being wrong. Processor vendors can't release a new processor that runs existing apps slower because no one would buy it (not counting monopolistic tactics). And since many existing apps are single-threaded, that means new processors have to at least maintain the same single-threaded performance which means keeping brainiac cores which means you can only afford 6-8 of them. (And arguably there are 64 weak cores in your CPU; they're just in the IGP and you have to program them with OpenCL.)
Go/Rust/Elixir are not so much progress IMO as undoing the negative progress of writing large-scale software in scripting languages.