[extropy-chat] A slow down in Moore's law?

Kevin Freels cmcmortgage at sbcglobal.net
Mon Oct 18 18:56:06 UTC 2004


So would you say that processing speeds are still doubling every 18 months
even though clock speeds are not? I have noticed the trend towards ever
faster memory and bus speeds, but when I recently upgraded with double
faster memory and bus speeds, I didn't notice the huge increase in
performance that I noticed the last time when I went from 700 Mhz to 1.4
Ghz. Also, my system is definitely not one that should be used to benchmark
average processing times. It is a hodgepodge of newer and older parts. Don't
get me wrong. The performance improved. It just wasn't as drastic as the
last upgrade and so I thought I would check out the processors. When I saw
that the top of the list was the 3.4 and it was at the top 8 months ago as
well, I started to wonder what was happening.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alfio Puglisi" <puglisi at arcetri.astro.it>
To: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:03 PM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] A slow down in Moore's law?


> On Mon, 18 Oct 2004, Kevin Freels wrote:
>
> >Some additional checking, which I admit was light,
> >revealed that the P4 1.7 Ghz processor was unveiled in 2001.
> >This is somewhat more than 18 months for a two-fold increase in
> >processing speed.
>
> Actually it would worse than that, because processing speed doesn't scale
> 1:1 with clock speed.
>
> >Is there a new processor out that I don;t know about,
> > or was the P4 released later than that?
> >Or os there something else that I am missing entirely?
>
> Just that clockspeed is a poor measure of performance. AMD Athlon64 and
> Opteron chips run around 2 Ghz, but they process data as fast or faster
> than P4s.  Intel's own Itanium, IBM Power5 and the rest of the server
> chips run between 1 and 2 Ghz, but go much faster than any desktop-level
> offer from AMD or Intel (well, apart from P4's integer performance which
> is really high).
>
> Cache architecture and dimensions, memory speed, bus design (for
> multiprocessor system), simultaneous multithreading (known as
> Hyperthreading in the P4 case, SMT for the others), all play a large
> factor in determining a processor performance, while clock speed is just
> another factor.
>
> Alfio
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