223
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
223 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
59300 readers
4640 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I remember 20 years ago already seeing 3ghz CPUs, isn't technology supposed to improve fast?
I remember when chips first hit 1GHz around 1999. Tech magazines were claiming that we'd hit 7GHz in 5 years.
What they failed to predict is that you start running into major heat issues if you try to go past ~3GHz. Which is why CPU manufacturers started focusing on other ways to improve performance, such as multiple cores and better memory management.
Just use the heat to power the machine.
Yeah, that's how it works.
And it has. The phone you have is faster than the 3GHz chip back then. A phone powered by a battery. And faster by like 20 times.
My dad had one of the first consumer 3GHz chips available. By the time I inherited it in 2009 it was completely outclassed by a <2GHz dual-core laptop.
Clock speed isn't improving that quickly anymore. Other aspects, such as more optimized power consumption, memory speeds, cache sized, less cycle-demanding operations, more cores have been improving faster instead.
That would've been a single 3ghz cpu core. Now we have dozens in one chip. Also, the instruction sets and microcode has gotten way better since then as well.
We're running into hard physical limits now, the transistors in each chip are so small that any smaller and they'd start running into quantumn effects that would render them unreliable.