Re:“Clean” Code, Horrible Performance
by DaiPlusPlus on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @11:24AM
(#34984141)
> You started your post saying that there's no correlation between transistors and performance.
No, that's not what I said: I'm saying that single-threaded performance is no-longer directly (let alone linearly) correlated with transistor count, and hasn't been for decades - but it's single-threaded performance that matters for most end-user applications on peoples' computers/smartphones/etc.
And Moore's Law makes no claims about performance increases either, only transistor density. It's literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article:
> Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend.
The link to performance (any kind of performance: parallel or serial) was made incorrectly by another Intel executive, David House, but that assumption simply isn't true.
To summarize: *yes*: bleeding-edge IC transistor density generally doubles every 18-24 months, but this does not translate into any kind of performance-doubling in end-user applications.
In fact, on the contrary, perceived "performance" (however you define it) outside of parallelizable programs, has demonstrably stagnated.
No, that's not what I said: I'm saying that single-threaded performance is no-longer directly (let alone linearly) correlated with transistor count, and hasn't been for decades - but it's single-threaded performance that matters for most end-user applications on peoples' computers/smartphones/etc.
And Moore's Law makes no claims about performance increases either, only transistor density. It's literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article:
> Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend.
The link to performance (any kind of performance: parallel or serial) was made incorrectly by another Intel executive, David House, but that assumption simply isn't true.
To summarize: *yes*: bleeding-edge IC transistor density generally doubles every 18-24 months, but this does not translate into any kind of performance-doubling in end-user applications. In fact, on the contrary, perceived "performance" (however you define it) outside of parallelizable programs, has demonstrably stagnated.