The death of CPU scaling

[mizzou]

Very apropos article from 2012. Hits home on a lot of thoughts I've had about the general state of the relationship between hardware and software.

http://www.extremetech.com/computin...o-many-and-why-were-still-stuck#disqus_thread

"Over the next few years scaling will continue to slowly improve. Intel will likely meander up to 6-8 cores for mainstream desktop users at some point, quad-cores will become standard at every product level, and we’ll see much tighter integration of CPU and GPU. Past that, it’s unclear what happens next. The gap between present-day systems and DARPA’s exascale computing initiative will diminish only marginally with each successive node; there’s no clear understanding of how — or if — classic Dennard scaling can be re-initiated."

 

[TheELF]

Intel will likely meander up to 6-8 cores for mainstream desktop users at some point, quad-cores will become standard at every product level, ...

This will happen when there is no more gains in single thread speed at all and no sooner since mainstream benefits much more from single speed.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

man its pretty sad. i can remember intel predicting 10,000ghz when the p3 came out, man 15 years later they havent even come close man. man.....

having said that i dont really feel like i need something faster that whats available.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Softwares inability to deliver and the new focus on performance/watt changed everything besides the physical limits.

Even if you could do 50% more performance today for 100% more power. It would hardly sell. And if we was to continue the previous trend, we would have what today, 500W CPUs?

 

[myocardia]

Even if you could do 50% more performance today for 100% more power. It would hardly sell. And if we was to continue the previous trend, we would have what today, 500W CPUs?

Dude, you've got to come over, and see my new asbestos case! It's HOT!