
Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002) - mikektung
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/75878/Brief_Intel_introduces_3_GHz_desktop_chip
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rogerbinns
Instructions per cycle has been getting somewhat better, and it is that number
multiplied by the clock speed that is a better indicator of actual performance
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle)

Everything else needs to keep up to - it is pointless having a fast processor
if it has to keep waiting on memory, storage and the network. Those are very
slowly catching up and also lead to overall improved performance.

I've been hoping that asynchronous implementations would take over. In theory
parts of the chip can run at whatever speeds are best for them at that time,
and not have to be synchronised with other parts. And when not in use they
easily power down. There were some async ARM chips made, but no progress since
2000
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor)

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nilsbunger
This was in Intel's dark days of P4 / "Netburst" microarchitecture. They
goosed lots of GHz out of the chip by going with a very deep pipeline, but
performance in real-world applications was terrible. (deep processor pipelines
kill you when you mispredict a branch).

I sat in on a few sales calls from Intel about their new Pentium M /
"Centrino" mobile architecture in 2003. What was amazing was that their
performance graphs showed that Centrino had all the performance of P4, but
with much lower power.

Basically, the terrible P4 microarchitecture, plus Intel's incompatible 64-bit
approach (Itanium, aka "the Itanic"), left a big hole in the market where AMD
stepped in and mopped up for 3-4 years with Opterons, the first 64-bit x86
processors.

Even today, x64 architecture is called "AMD64" for this reason -- AMD defined
the instruction set, and Intel had to follow (for once).

IPC is undoubtedly much higher today, plus now similar machines would have 4
cores or more.

~~~
yuhong
I wonder why it took until later in 2006 before a version of Pentium M showed
up with 64-bit support.

~~~
nilsbunger
Intel didn't release _any_ 64-bit x86 processors until 2005. They bet so
heavily on the alternative, Itanium, that it took them a few years to recover.

EDIT: it was actually mid-2004, as noted below.

~~~
yuhong
They release the first 64-bit Xeon in mid 2004.

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victorf
Light has been stuck at c for the last decade, too. When will it break this
barrier?

~~~
ioquatix
This is the most awesome comment in this post.

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axaxs
Clock speed is an unfortunate marketing gimmick anymore. I dare compare it to
peak horsepower. A 3ghz chip from today will run circles around a chip from
2002, and with less power to boot. AMD is ahead in the clock speed race, but
gets beat handily by "slower" Intel processors, while using twice the power.
The focus going forward is going to be on power efficiency and using more
cores, not clock speed.

~~~
ajross
This is true, but it's missing the point. A modern CPU gets probably 50% more
work out of a median clock cycle and runs 33% faster for single threaded
(turbo) workloads. So it's twice as fast. And sure, there are four of them on
the die.

But back up another decade to 1992, where a top of the line PC was a 50MHz 486
with well under half the IPC of the linked Northwood running 60x slower.

For those of us who remember the 80's and 90's, it's a very different world we
live in.

~~~
zokier
The (single threaded) performance improvement is significantly larger.
Anandtech has 2005 vintage Pentium in their benchmarks:
[http://anandtech.com/bench/product/92?vs=836](http://anandtech.com/bench/product/92?vs=836)
and there is probably a significant perf difference between 2002 and 2005.

And you can't really ignore the massive improvements gained via GPUs. There
are your 100x differences

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Mikeb85
The problem is physics. We can't get to higher clock speeds with current
materials, due to heat. It's kind of like how fighter jets haven't got any
faster (top speed anyway) since the 60's...

~~~
marshray
The MIG-25 is rated at Mach 2.8 GHz, but can be overclocked to 3.2.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-25](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-25)

~~~
dingaling
Indeed, and first flew in 1964. Note that the follow-on MiG-31 was
considerably slower despite sharing the general aerodynamic platform.

Since then Vmax has been declining, as the aerodynamics and mechanical
complications ( e.g variable intake ramps ) of higher-Mach flight were
determined to be less useful than transonic manouevrability and sustained
supercruising.

The exception to this trend has been the superfighter category ( F-111, F-14,
F-15, F-22, Su-27 ) which have maintained the same ~ M2.5 Vmax due to their
specific role. Yes, even the F-111 was meant to be a fleet fighter.

But none have pushed up past the heady M3.0 level that was routinely broken by
a series of prototypes in the 1960s.

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mikektung
Low power and multicore are cute and all, but imagine the type of machine
learning we could do on 384GHz cores.

~~~
morkfromork
Imagine the type of machine learning we could do on low power 384GHz multi-
cores

~~~
aheilbut
Imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384 low power 1GHz cores.

~~~
pjscott
Not everything parallelizes nicely. Given enough processors, serial
computation eventually becomes the bottleneck:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law)

~~~
aheilbut
Many machine learning methods parallelize _extremely_ nicely.

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Aardwolf
Cool. Back then there still were articles about a new faster desktop CPU!
Today, whenever there's news about a CPU, it's about some other low power
mobile whatever thing that is not faster. Yawn.

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derefr
I wonder: what ratio of FLOPs would you get, between this chip, and an array
of "low power mobile whatever thing"s adding up to an equivalent power-draw?

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millstone
Surely DSPs or GPUs achieve the best FLOPs per watt.

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ilaksh
If we can't make the clock speed faster what about massively increasing the
size of the on chip cache? I think they call them like l2 and l3 or something.
If I had 1gb of cache then maybe my whole program could run without doing much
main memory access. That would be fast right?

~~~
wmf
Check out Haswell GT3e with 128 MB of L4 cache. It helps, but probably not
enough to justify what they're charging for it.

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Impossible
We've made _some_ progress with GHz :).
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239098/Desktop_chips...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239098/Desktop_chips_zip_past_4GHz_next_stop_5GHz_)

~~~
NoPiece
Indeed, AMD announced their first 5ghz CPU in June at E3.

[http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-
unleashes-201...](http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-
unleashes-2013jun11.aspx)

It is for sale now at Newegg for $699. 4.7ghz with 5ghz turbo.

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113347)

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veemjeem
Though speed bumps aren't exactly as crazy as the old days. I remember my next
upgrade from a 50Mhz 486 ended up being a 266Mhz Pentium 2. This was over a
span of about 3 years.

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auctiontheory
Power consumption is much better.

~~~
stephengillie
x86 & x86-64 cores still create heat like incandescent lightbulbs.

