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The doubling of computing power every 18 months is officially dead. CPUs haven't been getting any faster over the past six years. Even Gordon Moore himself predicted this death in 2005. Some people say parallel processing is the only way to go now. Others think that special processors like GPUs can hold up the slack for a while.
But the end result is that computers aren't getting faster. Sure, the number of cores are increasing, but not nearly at the rate at which the CPU speed used to advance. Also, software has to be developed in fundamentally different ways to take advantage of multiple cores. Some things like ray tracing elegantly translate to parallel processing. Other things like compilers, not so much.
Have we peaked in terms of the rate of hardware advancement? Will progress in computers now be as slow as every other field? If so, how will that change society and the industries that rely on rapid advancement?
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It's dead because people have stopped paying $2500 for the latest and greatest.
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Uh, no. DESKTOP CPUs have largely stagnated, but server CPUs at the same price point are more than 5x faster than 6 years ago, and mobile CPUs are more than 20x faster than 6 years ago.
Nobody cares about desktop CPU speeds anymore because they don't matter.
By the way, clock speed != "faster". A single 2Ghz Ivy Bridge is more than 10x faster than a 4Ghz pentium 4.
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Computer has been getting smaller and smaller with today's phone rivaling NASA's computer back in 1969. Doesn't that say anything about the advancement of technology?
At least there's more exposure to technology and tech is not only in the geek realm anymore.
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Picture taking abilities aside, today's phones are less capable than a Pentium 486 computer running Windows 3.1.
Now bare in mind, if you took away all of the other processes that were running on Windows 3.1 and you only executed one function apps like run on the smart phones. That windows box would be 5 times faster than an iPhone.
Smartphones just lack the math coprocessor. That is why they will never replace computers that can do practical productivity applications. Not until they include a math coprocessor.
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jvolstad's website
I work on a system that supports up to 4,095 CPU's. HP Nonstop. Of course that was with the old single core chips. Maybe more now with the quad core chips.
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CaptainShuddup says
You have no idea what you're talking about.
CaptainShuddup says
You have no idea what you're talking about. Please, tell us more about how you believe multi tasking works on modern smartphones.
CaptainShuddup says
Yeah, a 16Mhz 486 is outperforming a dual core 800Mhz Cortex A9. Sure. Because people who don't know what they're talking about are experts on this stuff.
CaptainShuddup says
Holy fucking shit, now you're just making things up. This isn't 1997.
A single A15 core can do 10 gigaflops at 1.4Ghz. That's approximately half of what the last generation Ivy Bridge desktop CPUs were doing at the same clock speed, but with less than one 20th of the power consumption.
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Kevin says
My vote for best comment of the day.
From the Wikipedia page about ARM processor (used in iPhone 4, e.g.)
"VFP (Vector Floating Point) technology is an FPU coprocessor extension to the ARM architecture. It provides low-cost single-precision and double-precision floating-point computation fully compliant with the ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985 Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic. "
The iPhones GPU isn't exactly last century technology, either.
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After reading too many web pages yesterday, here's my take. VFP was abandoned after ARM7's but single precision floating point is included in processors with NEON extensions -- that is all Cortex-A8s, but NEON is optional in A9s. I would imagine that even floating point emulation in software on modern ARM processors can keep up with 486's hardware math coprocessors.
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My Desktop at home is an 8 year old AMD Athlon XP and it works just fine and still does everything I need it to.
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Your smart phone is toy pure and simple, it is a culmination of what the PC has evolved or devolved as it were into. Had Windows 3.1 been as useless as the smart phone, a few people would still be on their Lisa in obscurity playing with their little computer hobby. The PC made them practical and productive.
As the internet grew, some people realized they don't need all of the computing power that was even in a Windows 3.1, they need graphics, sound and connectivity. And that is where we are today with the smart phone, show me a graphics suite, software development, 3D modeling, Office productivity suite for the smart phone, that was even half as robust as Office 6, or Corel Draw, Photo Shop, Auto Cad, Borland C+ or Visual Studio 3, and I'll eat my keyboard letters that spell out...
"I don't know what in the hell I'm talking about"
I mean it's not like Android doesn't freeze just displaying a toast dialog almost monthly.
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http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5103957/why-does-using-float-instead-of-double-not-improve-android-performance
http://gamesfromwithin.com/break-that-thumb-for-best-iphone-performance
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You know I actually work on these things for a living, right?
The very idea that there was "more computing power" in windows 3.1 than in a modern smartphone is a claim that doesn't even make sense.
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Smartphones are simply dumb terminals with smart graphics. They are meant to be I/O devices only. It's just that today I/O requires a lot of processing power for audio, video, graphics, and encryption. However, smart phones are still functionally dumb terminals following the same centralized model that terminals and mainframes used in the 1970s. The only difference is that you can connect to many servers instead of one.
However, as I/O devices go, smart phones are pretty cool.
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Dan8267 says
I think that's a fair assessment. Our architecture guy says the real action now and at least for the foreseeable future is in eliminating or at least managing the I/O bottleneck. The whole CPU race thing is basically dead due to the widespread availability of virtualization. IBM sort of pioneered that technology during the mainframe days and then brought it one and two steps forward with their pSeries line but now most shops have VMware and that runs on commodity hardware. I haven't done much AIX work for several years now. It's all Red Hat on VMware running on basically disposable hardware.
As for the HP Nonstop line, it was originally Tandem Nonstop and I think Wall Street still uses them. They DO NOT go down but they are also not cheap.
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rootvg says
To a large extend that's true. However, there are also other factors that have been limiting CPU progress: heat, memory transfer rates, and reaching the limits of miniaturization.
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Dan8267 says
Smartphones are meant to be I/O devices only? You have to be joking. Network connections on mobile are pathetic, even in good conditions. Mobile is rapidly moving computation back to the client, after nearly a decade of steadily offloading things to the servers in the era of fast home broadband.
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You haven't heard of software as a service, have you? Why sell software when you can rent it out for much more profit?
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Dan8267 says
That's...exactly what I'm referring to. Desktop software has been driven to the server for the last decade. Mobile apps are moving that back to the client.
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I think Kevin reads to much Infoweekly.
Do you do the surveys too?