What if you knew how computers work? (2015)

Re:What if you knew how computers work? (2015) by dTal on Saturday October 10, 2020 @11:18AM (#24739528)

There is no "Moore's law for performance". Moore's law is a statement about the number of transistors on a chip, nothing more (Moore?). And sure enough, the Threadripper machine I built this year has about double the number of transistors as the Threadripper machine I built last year, which has about double the number of transistors to the one before that... (although this is partly a function of increasing budget; Moore's law specifies a two year doubling).

But sure, if you want to talk performance - the fastest CPU this year, the Threadripper 3990X, is over 100x faster than the fastest CPU of 2005, the Athlon 64 FX-57. That's about 7-8 doublings, or pretty much spot on.

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Re:What if you knew how computers work? (2015) by mcguire on Saturday October 10, 2020 @12:13PM (#24739909)

Faster how, exactly? The clock rate is ~4/3. It has 128 half-cores, but the benefits will depend on the workload. :-)

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Re:What if you knew how computers work? (2015) by konjin on Saturday October 10, 2020 @05:28PM (#24742001)

For a very long time between 1970 and 2005 doubling the transistors halved the time taken for any task. We're well past this point.

If you don't think so try and calculate a_{i+1} = rand_int() a_i mod 232 on a machine from today and one from 2005. Then do the same with a machine from 2005 and 1990.

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