Ask Slashdot: Why Are There No Huge Leaps Forward In CPU/GPU Power?

dryriver writes: We all know that CPUs and GPUs and other electronic chips get a little faster with each generation produced. But one thing never seems to happen -- a CPU/GPU manufacturer suddenly announcing a next generation chip that is, say, 4-8 times faster than the fastest model they had 2 years ago. There are moderate leaps forward all the time, but seemingly never a HUGE leap forward due to, say, someone clever in R&D discovering a much faster way to process computing instructions. Is this because huge leaps forward in computing power are technically or physically impossible/improbable? Or is nobody in R&D looking for that huge leap forward, and rather focused on delivering a moderate leap forward every 2 years? Maybe striving for that "rare huge leap forward in computing power" is simply too expensive for chip manufacturers? Precisely what is the reason that there is never a next-gen CPU or GPU that is, say, advertised as being 16 times faster than the one that came 2 years before it due to some major breakthrough in chip engineering and manufacturing?

Comments

One word

[sl3xd]

Physics

Re:One word

[DontBeAMoran]

The problem is that each new generation of programmers is lazier than the one before them. All the increased CPU power is wasted on bloated librairies, OS processes, etc.

Re:One word

[geoskd]

The problem is everyone is hell bent on smaller for the sake of performance. and it's stupid. dont make smaller, make bigger.

There are a whole host of problems with that.

First and foremost, physics strikes again with the speed of light. Pretty much all modern processing is done synchronously which means that it requires a clock signal that changes everywhere at the same time. As you expand that size of the processor, suddenly things get out of sync. There are ways to fight this, but they are tricky and dont scale well.

Second, As die size increases, Power consumption increases faster. All the current your processor draws passes through some parasitic resistance in getting there. The bigger the die, the more parasitic resistance. If you take a chip that draws 50 watts and put two of them on a die, the power draw is now 105 watts because the new chip draws more than 50 watts (it has to pull power through a slightly longer set of wires, as does the original one)

Third, cost. The single most important factor in processor cost is yield. Any given silicon wafer will have a certain number of defects on it that will render any chip at that location unusable. If you get on average two defects per wafer, and you have 100 chips on a wafer, then you get 98 good chips and two bad ones (98% yield) . If you have two defects per wafer and there are only 10 chips on that wafer, you get 8 good chips and two bad ones (80% yield) (gross over-simplification).

There are a whole cadre of other issues that chip designers and manufacturers have to deal with such as interconnects and shared resources, etc...

Re: One word

[Cesare Ferrari]

I'm not sure what world you are living in, but in the one i'm in, we have CPUs with a lot more cores the 4, 6 or 8.

For starters, mainstream Intel dual socket supporting processors have 22 core options - E5-4669 v4 for example. So, you can get 44 cores into a dual socket machine.

Sun/Oracle got into this game in a big way with their T series processors, and blurred threads vs cores (in a very interesting way), so produce things like the T5 with 16 cores and 128 threads - it's like hyperthreading, but very cleverly done, so instead of relying on out of order execution to keep the execution units humming, you use multiple threads. Of course you can get multi-socket machines for these too, so you can get a T5-8, so 8 sockets (128 cores, 1024 threads).

So, high core count is out there, you just jave to look a little further than intel processors aimed at the desktop market.

Business decision

[BoFo]

Every advance has to be paid for by the consumer. Each incremental advance comes as the previous one is marketed.

Why Are There No Huge Leaps Forward In CPU power?

[JoeyRox]

NVIDIA's 2016 Pascal architecture was significantly faster than their previous Maxwell architecture.

"Relative to GTX 980 then, we're looking at an average performance gain of 66% at 1440p, and 71% at 4K. This is a very significant step up for GTX 980 owners,"

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-and-1070-founders-edition-review/32

Breakthroughs are NOT plannable projects

[redelm]

The poster asks a question that assumes breakthroughs can be planned just like any other development project. But breakthroughs are not, or rather, those that can be planned and worked already have been. The computer science field has been operating awash with funding for at least 55 years.

I'm not saying there are no breathoughts out there, what I'm saying is that our current project methodology has already discovered all it can, and most future breathoughs will come from some other methodology.

The target, CPU/GPU power is also not especially compelling -- compared to the past, there is much less pressure to increase performance, and considerable uncertainty how the increase will be helpful.

Re:Breakthroughs are NOT plannable projects

[sl3xd]

I'd mod you up if I could... at this point, it's starting to look like we need a material breakthrough - Silicon appears to be reaching its limits.

Most People Only Want a Window to the Internet.

[DatbeDank]

Right about 2008/2009 computer hardware became "good enough" to appeal to people's basic needs which really only centered on having a simple window to the internet. Netbooks became available and smartphones started to become good enough to browse the internet on their own. Consumers at the end of the day really only want a platform that's able to view into the internet.

Someone can correct me, but I believe such innovation is still occurring for server technology and niche fields like a/v production, cad, and animation. Though, I do yearn for the olden days when consumer technology was cool and exciting. Being a tech nerd in the 90s was something else!

Re:milking it

[msauve]

...because of software inefficiency and planned obsolescence. Ever wonder why current Windoze takes about the same time to boot as Win 3.1 running on a 486? It's not because Windoze does 10,000 times more (useful stuff) today. (486DX2 ~25 MIPS, i7 5960X ~240K MIPS).

Re:No context

[Lumpy]

You need a netbook.

I need a 6ghz 8 core because I do actual work on the computer like compiling and rendering.

PC's are Not adequate because software today is complete shit, almost none of it is written well for multi threading.

Again, mostly because programmers coming out of colleges are poorly trained, and then companies want them to bang out trash and not well optimized code that takes advantage of the hardware.

Re: milking it

[lgw]

My Chromebook takes mere seconds to boot, whereas an IBM AT could easily take minutes. And of course, my modern device performs tasks that would have been the domain of supercomputers in the past.

Time to take off the rose colored glasses. I did live through the eighties and nineties, and computing was pathetic back then ... we just didn't know any better

My Commodore 64 took about 0.1 seconds to boot. We just suck at "fast" these days.

Laziness

[Tenebrousedge]

Laziness is a virtue in a programmer.

The whole point of this profession is to save labor. That includes programmer labor, especially because it's an expensive commodity.

I don't know who has mod points today but this comment is frankly ridiculous.