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It's 2010 - why aren't CPU speeds faster?

A

Angus66

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 22, 2008
Messages
487
I know that cpu speed isn't the end-all-be-all of a processors performance, but why hasn't it gone beyond - or even reached - 4Ghz? Is it due to power requirements? Heat output? Limits of the current manufacturing tech? I'm talking about air cooled cpu's here - not exotically cooled rigs.

It seems like it's been a LONG time since cpu's hit 2/3Ghz, and I vaguely recall predictions that 4/6/8/10Ghz weren't far off.
 
Industry focus on new architecture and die miniaturization (i.e. 45nm to 32nm) instead of clock speed on existing architecture
 
friend'scatdied said:
Industry focus on new architecture and die miniaturization (i.e. 45nm to 32nm) instead of clock speed on existing architecture
Click to expand...

Correct. About a decade ago, when Intel and AMD hit the 1Ghz line, they shifted focus away from pure clock speed as that method of extended performance and maintaining reasonable heat and power characteristics become more difficult. In other words, the the brute force way of increasing performance has simply become a less efficient way for Intel and AMD to increase performance.
 
So to put it simply - the focus change from clock speeds to dual/quad/etc cores is due to having reached a point of diminishing returns?
 
the core clocks you're referring to is from a single core, when you look at it from a big picture you see a cpu chip thats a p4 3ghz thats ONE core in a single cpu. Now you see FOUR cores each clocked at 3ghz each in a single cpu. There's really no point in having one cpu core clocked at 8ghz since performance wise wouldn't be comparable for usage as the quad cores with 4x at 4ghz+
 
not to mention 1 core of an i7 @ 2.6 is more efficient / faster than 1 core of a p4 @ 2.6 or even 3.6 most likely
 
You could also load more programs/apps simultaneously without getting performance drops.
 
There making a 6 core soon. 6 X 2ghz = 12ghz so I think we are on track to 100ghz some day with a 50 core processor.
 
The reason is heat and power. Higher speeds are certainly possible if you want to run your CPU inside a massive refrigerator.

I think the world record is somewhere around 500 GHz by researchers at Georgia Tech.

Having said that a single core 4 GHz CPU is >> than a dual core CPU at 2 GHz (assuming same cache) for most applications. Only for embarrassing parallel applications the performance will be equal.

Intel and AMD are adding cores like there is no tomorrow but where are the libraries and tools that can help developers write parallel programs.

Most current generation desktop apps and games hardly utilize more than 1 or 2 cores.
 
friend'scatdied said:
Industry focus on new architecture and die miniaturization (i.e. 45nm to 32nm) instead of clock speed on existing architecture
Click to expand...

That is bullocks!

There is a reason why Intel hasen't released 4GHz chips and it has nothing to do with "focus" as you put it.
 
Angus66 said:
I know that cpu speed isn't the end-all-be-all of a processors performance, but why hasn't it gone beyond - or even reached - 4Ghz? Is it due to power requirements? Heat output? Limits of the current manufacturing tech? I'm talking about air cooled cpu's here - not exotically cooled rigs.

It seems like it's been a LONG time since cpu's hit 2/3Ghz, and I vaguely recall predictions that 4/6/8/10Ghz weren't far off.
Click to expand...

It is limits of the current manufacturing tech in a nut shell. That plus heat issues...

I read this in a PC mag a few years back and it pointed the above fact out.
 
People are more concerned about how green and efficient their machines are so priority would shift to smaller die, less power usage and better efficiency rather than just upping the GHz ?
 
It has to do with the fact that current manufacturing methods and technology. Our transistors do not work well past 4-5ghz, chips start sucking up power like it's nothing, producing heat that is off the charts, and maintaining stability can be hard to pull off. Current CPU's already produce the most heat per square unit of area out of any man made item in the world. This is why die shrinks are a constant push in the CPU industry, helps reduce heat, maximize the number of processors per silicon wafer (reduces cost), and so on. It has it's drawbacks other than being a really, really, really, really, really small spaces to try and build in (gate dielectric volt leakage for example [the gates inside the cpu keep getting thinner as things are shrunk and electrons pretty much literally leak out of them]).

Current i7's have a thermal TDP of 130W! That's 130W of heat from an area of 263mm^2, about the size of your fingertip. According to a heat conversion app, 130W/Hr is the same as full sunlight hitting an area of 6.72ft^2 and collecting for 5 hours. Remember the days when heatsinks used to be just blocks of metal that just had fins cut out? That required practically no development from a perspective of thermal performance. Is it the size of the processor? Good, just run a saw through it a few times to give it some more surface area... Now we require 700g+ heatsinks that use Copper, aluminum, zinc, and sometimes even silver, in conjunction with multiple heatpipes and lots of airflow to keep your CPU from trying to melt itself. We used to think 60W Athlons were insanely hot. Let me do some quick calculations

263mm^2 at 130W
If the die were 1 square meter it would use roughly 494kW... Heat is extremely concentrated in integrated circuits...

But anyway, 3-4GHz is approaching the limit of what current silicon and associated technologies can reasonably handle. This is why companies in the industry are researching things like optical interconnects and different kinds of substrates, we're pretty much at the limit of what traditional silicon can do before things are out of hand to run outside of an extreme setup.

Therefore you see improvements in microarchitecture as the way to keep moving forward in the mean time. And theoretically a quad core can approach almost double the performance of a dual core of the same design and clock speed. The problem lies in our software. Keep in mind that the software industry has been built on 20+ years of running applications on single threaded x86 machines. Multi-threading is still far from mature from a software perspective. So things can really only go up from here with multi core as software improves. Yes, your processor will get "slower" as time goes on because apps get more demanding your experience will no longer be as smooth as it once was. But in terms of absolute performance numbers (things like MFLOPS) of what the CPU will be doing in real time will improve because software will make better use of what is available.
 
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A big issue with frequency scaling is that the faster you make individual transistors switch, the less time you have to transfer data from one side of the chip to the other. As the speed with which signals can be transferred over a wire within an IC is pretty much fixed until we find some revolutionary way to speed it up, this puts a really big brick wall in the way of just ramping up the GHz.

The P4's Netburst design ran into huge thermal issues as well as the above issue, and a complete rethink was required, something more along the lines of AMD's K7, which had much higher IPC than the Netburst design. The latter brute-forcing its way through calculations using its massive pipeline and high cycle frequency. What Intel then came up with was the PIII design reborn, first as the Pentium M, then the Core design. Shorter pipeline, higher IPC, lots of caches and features to make it do as much as possible with as little effort as possible, thus rendering a frequency unnecessary :)
 
Angus66 said:
I know that cpu speed isn't the end-all-be-all of a processors performance, but why hasn't it gone beyond - or even reached - 4Ghz? Is it due to power requirements? Heat output? Limits of the current manufacturing tech? I'm talking about air cooled cpu's here - not exotically cooled rigs.

It seems like it's been a LONG time since cpu's hit 2/3Ghz, and I vaguely recall predictions that 4/6/8/10Ghz weren't far off.
Click to expand...


because its not required anymore.. the architectures are far more efficient then they were back in the old days where the only performance gain was by pure horsepower..

as far as the prediction's go.. im sure everyone remembers the quote about bill gates claiming 64kb of ram was all we would ever need.. pretty much tells you everything about predictions when it comes to technology..
 
GotNoRice said:
No.
Click to expand...

Hell no! :p

(fixed it for ya. :D)

Another thing is that while it is possible to get higher speeds (most of us here do it fairly easily with better heatsinks and tweaks, that kind of manipulation is not suited for the mass market. Mom and pop and even Joe Engineer do not want to fool with a machine like we do and Intel does not want to get out on the bleeding edge, CPU cost would go through the roof. Intel is mainly about making money with reliable easy to use cpus that do not require exotic platforms. That is not to say who knows what is going on the the back labs but other companies have found their nich in the super high performance cpu area (most are bankrupt now) .

So my take on it is, they could do it but it is not cost effective and not suited for general use. They got the technology down and the current 3-4GHz per core is as fast as most people ever need and if that is not sufficient horsepower it is cheaper and more cost effective to just add another core than to deal with the issues (nicely outlined in previous posts) of further increasing clock speed in huge jumps. Their tic-tock development cycle is a plan they will stick with and as mentioned in posts above the physics issues are becoming harder to overcome. Just tack on another core.

We will need a truly "must have" software "next big thing" that resists multi-threading to force the hardware to go faster. And that is unlikely as the "must have next big thing" in software is parallelism so any app can run multi-core.

But, one good materials science/physics breakthrough and it all changes. jeez if you had ever got a 300MHz Celerion to run at 500MHz you would be in awe of the current tech. CPU are doing good. Where the hell is my flying car ?
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
because its not required anymore.. the architectures are far more efficient then they were back in the old days where the only performance gain was by pure horsepower..

as far as the prediction's go.. im sure everyone remembers the quote about bill gates claiming 64kb of ram was all we would ever need.. pretty much tells you everything about predictions when it comes to technology..
Click to expand...

Bill Gates never said that, please don't spread that 'internet legend' (if you want to know something interesting about that, it was IBMs fault that MS-DOS was limited to 640k because it was IBM that chose the 16-bit 8086 for the original IBM PC that was limited to 1MB, 640k for programs and 384k for bios and vram - MS had no choice on the memory ceiling given the processor they had to write for.)
 
as someone who is "fixing" a 1.6ghz celeron for a customer (they are wasting their money) i have to say it is the the focus on architectures. god knows a 1.6ghz intel atom feels about 100 times faster than this dog.
 
And a 1.6ghz Core2 feels 100 times faster than the Atom :) Well, not quite 100 times, but a decade or two faster.
 
I am happy with the focus amd and Intel are taking. I'd much rather be able to have several programs open with no performance decrease instead of being able to have one program running that loads faster than I can click it.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
maleficarus said:
That is bullocks!

There is a reason why Intel hasen't released 4GHz chips and it has nothing to do with "focus" as you put it.
Click to expand...

Right. :eek: So I guess Nehalem, Sandy Bridge, and Bulldozer don't mean shit. Even though they're circumventing the heat issues and intrinsic GHz wall (that wall being variable to each platform of course), and increasing chip efficiency.

Would you have preferred long-term focus?
 
nicknations said:
I am happy with the focus amd and Intel are taking. I'd much rather be able to have several programs open with no performance decrease instead of being able to have one program running that loads faster than I can click it.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
Click to expand...

This is the mantality I just do not understand. What is the point, or even logic in having several appz running at the same time? Like for example, how can it make any sense whatsoever say doing a doc for school in MS publisher while decoding a movie with a game running in the back ground all the while talking on MSN messenger and using Ventilio-AND having 14 porn web sites open at the same time?

LOL

I laugh, but seriously how does that make any sense at all? If I was doing a report for school I wouldn't be doing anything else period! I wouldn't be trying to decode a stupid movie. I wouldn't be talking on MSN to some idiot. I wouldn't be veiwing 45 web sites at the same stupid time. Do you see what I'm getting at here? The whole mantality of doing all these things at the same time is retarted to say the least and to me is nothing but a silly excuse to justify a quad core or 6 core CPU. Geez.....
 
maleficarus said:
I laugh, but seriously how does that make any sense at all? If I was doing a report for school I wouldn't be doing anything else period! I wouldn't be trying to decode a stupid movie. I wouldn't be talking on MSN to some idiot. I wouldn't be veiwing 45 web sites at the same stupid time. Do you see what I'm getting at here? The whole mantality of doing all these things at the same time is retarted to say the least and to me is nothing but a silly excuse to justify a quad core or 6 core CPU. Geez.....
Click to expand...

You'll get a nice performance boost moving from that E8400 to a Q9550, trust me.;)

But seriously, some like to browse, run an antivirus scan, and encode a movie at the same time. Some like to unzip gigabytes worth of media files while running a creativity app (Photoshop, Premiere, Reason at al) seamlessly. There are countless ways quad-cores come in handy, and their performance benefits are well-realized outside of games.
 
Soon we'll have 6 core CPUs with hyper-threading.

- Damnit Scotty! I need more virtual processors!!
- Stop looking at so much pron captain, if you pull it any harder, the whole thing could blow!
 
maleficarus said:
I laugh, but seriously how does that make any sense at all? If I was doing a report for school I wouldn't be doing anything else period!
Click to expand...

Huh? I think this is a bit short sighted and not the case today anyway. By its very nature an OS is a bunch of programs and processes running simultaneously anyway. I mean, you can plug in an flash drive, recorder a tv show, download files, and yes, transcode that video while writing that paper. Why not if the computer has the power to handle all those tasks? Computing power is all about doing more in less time.

I'm almost NEVER working inside a single app or doing just a single task on my PC.
 
I'm almost NEVER working inside a single app or doing just a single task on my PC.
Click to expand...

This definitely depends a lot on the user.

As far as writing a report (unless you have a 5 year old pc or some other system problem - virus antivirus ..) over 90% of the time you will be running word at less than 5% cpu usage so to me single core performance does not make a big difference there.

Single threaded games its more important.

As far as this discussion goes, would you trade your 3+ GHz dual core or better for a 8GHz to 10GHz single core with HT (maybe even 4 way HT) but less than 1/3 the IPC so that single threaded performance would be generally less than it is today for most applications with few exceptions that are much faster than today.
 
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drescherjm said:
This definitely depends a lot on the user.

As far as writing a report (unless you have a 5 year old pc or some other system problem - virus antivirus ..) over 90% of the time you will be running word at less than 5% cpu usage so to me single core performance does not make a big difference there.

Single threaded games its more important.
Click to expand...

I'm just thinking of the average office worker where I work. Just about all of them are running Outlook, have a browser or three open, Office Communicator, running a business app and working on a document all at the same time all day long.

Sure this all depends on the user, but I think its more common than perhaps you're thinking.
 
maleficarus said:
This is the mantality I just do not understand. What is the point, or even logic in having several appz running at the same time?
Click to expand...
I suppose asking the question of why people would multitask is legitimate. After all, not everyone is familiar with work in a office environment, so youngsters like you probably wouldn't know, and that's understandable. I might even have explained if you just left it at that.

maleficarus said:
LOL. I laugh, but seriously how does that make any sense at all? If I was doing a report for school I wouldn't be doing anything else period! ... The whole mantality of doing all these things at the same time is retarted to say the least and to me is nothing but a silly excuse to justify a quad core.......
Click to expand...
Making judgements based on clearly limited information and experience and focused solely on you, well, the word you used (retarded) comes to mind. Just avoid any work where you need to multitask or anything involving making (rational) decisions involving other people and you'll probably be fine. Maybe. LoL.
 
L0s7 4 Lyf3 said:
[...] And theoretically a quad core can approach almost double the performance of a dual core of the same design and clock speed. The problem lies in our software. Keep in mind that the software industry has been built on 20+ years of running applications on single threaded x86 machines. Multi-threading is still far from mature from a software perspective. [...]
Click to expand...
Aaahhh, that makes perfectly sense. Considering how long we have multicore for already, when are the software developers are going to pick up I wonder ?
Do they already classify what PC games have been optimized for 2 or even 4 cores ?
And by the way .... how on earth should I be able to pronounce your screen name, let alone remember it ?

friend'scatdied said:
You'll get a nice performance boost moving from that E8400 to a Q9550, trust me.
Click to expand...
I had a E8400 in operation for about 18 months, until I "upgraded" to a Q9550.
I have not noticed ANY performance gain ... except higher temperatures.
For economics reason, I would rather go back to E8400 actually ... for my needs though.
 
I laugh, but seriously how does that make any sense at all? If I was doing a report for school I wouldn't be doing anything else period! I wouldn't be trying to decode a stupid movie. I wouldn't be talking on MSN to some idiot. I wouldn't be veiwing 45 web sites at the same stupid time. Do you see what I'm getting at here? The whole mantality of doing all these things at the same time is retarted to say the least and to me is nothing but a silly excuse to justify a quad core or 6 core CPU. Geez.....
Click to expand...
When my PC is together and ffxiv comes out, I'll be running these things at all times:
FFXIV, Firefox, Winamp+Streamripper, Pigeon, Notepad, Windows Live Mail, and probably FRAPS(although I won't always be recording.) Things that'll I'll pop up randomly to do stuff quickly or randomly include photoshop, word, MPC-HC, UltraVNC Viewer, CheatEngine, something to encode with(windows encoder?), and something like Adobe Premier.

I can't imagine only doing one thing and one thing only. Maybe it's my adhd? I doubt it though, lol.
 
Considering how long we have multicore for already, when are the software developers are going to pick up I wonder ?
Click to expand...

Depends on the developer and management. As a software developer myself I have been writing multithreaded code for over 10 years. I have also had at least a 2 core x86 system at home since the mid 90s so it's not like we have not had some time..

With that said optimizing for more than 1 core can be much harder than writing code for a single core. Debugging is much harder. Also not all problems can be divided easily among multiple cores. Then there is management, I mean if the majority of target audience (not high end gamers) does not have a 2 core or better system no reason to spend 3 times as long to develop for the users who do.
 
Best way I can explain it is the picture about halfway down this page:
Sorry, its from anand.

With the advent of multi core CPU's, to stay within the power consumption of original single core cpus, they have to cut the amount of power each core uses.
As you can see, the scaling for increased cores to GHz is inversely proportional.

Intels solution (which i like a lot) is the turbo modes on the newer I7 cpus and future processors to come. Early dual core/quads have no ability to shut down a core in favor of higher frequencies on a single core. While we are still a ways off on 10GHz single core technology, I think this is a step in the right direction.

Assuming we note the increased efficiency from core 2's to I7s (ghz vs ghz), we can see that the i7 920 holds its own against higher clocked core 2 quads. If you take equally clocked i7 vs C2Q, youll see the i7 is usually faster by some margin.

The problem with the whole dual core vs quad core debate is on systems where overclocking isnt an option, which is faster. Ill continue to make this assumption, as far as gaming is concerned, an e8500 will still be one of the fastest non overclocked processors for games that dont utilize more than 2 cores.

If the rumors are true, future intel hex core processors will probably release in the low to mid 2ghz range. Even if the new processors are 100% more efficient than my e8400 clocked at 4.4ghz, a 2.2ghz hex core would only be equal to my e8400 in gaming performance on a game that supports only 2 cores.

But assume intel can get roughly 1ghz gains for shutting down 4 of the 6 cores. Take that 2.2ghz hex core, now making it a 3.2ghz dual core. If the new technology is 50% more efficient than my e8400, Id have to clock at 4.8ghz to keep up.

Catch my drift? You're right, some programs benefit directly from frequency scaling, and if the applications dont take advantages of new instructions, then you wont see the new efficiencies apparent.

Now I haven't done any testing on how overclocking CPU's with turbo frequencies happens. Do you have to disable the turbo? Can you keep it enabled and set max stable frequencies to scale to? eg(assume 2.2ghz stock);
6core : 3ghz
4core : 3.4ghz
2core : 4ghz
1core : 5ghz

$.02
 
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