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In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) the steady across-the-board increase in processing power didn't equate to programs running much faster, e.g. Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago.

SSDs provided a huge bump in performance to each individual computer, but trickled their way into market saturation over a generation or two of computers, so you'd be effectively running the same software but in a much more responsive environment.

> Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.

"Bananas" core-counts gave me the same experience. Some year ago I moved to Ryzen Threadripper and experienced similar "Wow, compiling this project is now 4x faster" or "processing this TBs of data is now 8x faster", but of course it's very specific to specific workloads where concurrency and parallism is thought of from the ground up, not a general 2x speed up in everything.

> The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time.

About a week ago, completely out of the blue, YouTube recommended this old gem to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jQZxH7NgM

A Pentium 4, overclocked to 5GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling.

Watching this was such an amazing throwback. I remember clearly the last time I saw it, which was when an excited friend showed it to me on a PC at our schools library. A year or so before YouTube even existed.

By 2005, my Pentium 4 Prescott at home had some 3.6GHz without overclocking, 4GHz models for the consumer market were already announced (but plagued by delays), but surely 10GHz was "just a few more years away".

When Alder Lake finally made a sizable jump, I looked at decades of old tests I'd done along the way with CPUs and tried to bridge them together reasonably.

Between IPC (~50 to 100-fold improvement) and clock speed increases (1000-fold alone), I estimated that single-thread performance has increased on the order of 50,000x - 100,000x since the 4.77 MHz 8088.

In human terms this is like one minute compared to one month!

I still remember my first CPU with a heatsink. It seemed like a temporary dumb hack.

SSDs were such a revolution though, and a really rewarding upgrade. I'd fit SSDs to friend and family computers as an upgrade.

I think the single biggest jump I ever experienced was my first dedicated GPU — a GeForce 2 MX if I'm not mistaken.

Agreed. That was the next big boost! I installed my first SSD in this HP workstation-grade laptop that we got "for free" from college. It was like getting a brand new computer! In fact, I ended up giving that computer to my sister who ran it into the ground.

I didn't feel any huge speed boosts like that until the M1 MacBook in 2020.

GPUs for 3d graphics were a game changer.

I can see why you wouldn’t consider it as impactful if you weren’t into gaming at the time.

My first pentium was clocked at 60Mhz.

I remember our school getting new computers to replace the 233Mhz G3 iMac computer lab during the Megahertz Wars and the vice principal announcing the purchase of new "screaming fast" 600 Mhz Dell Optiplex GX100. The nice thing is that the G3 iMacs then got pushed out to the classrooms, but it was sad to see Apple lose the spot in the lab. I miss the wonder of playing Pangea Software games for the first time like Bugdom and Nanosaur.

That wasn't how it worked.

Up until the 486, the clock speed and bus speed were basically the same and topped out at about 33MHz (IIRC). The 486 started the thing of making the CPU speed a multiple of the bus speed eg 486dx2/66 (33MHz CPU, 66MHz bus), 486dx4/100 (25MHz CPU, 100MHz bus). And that's continued to this day (kind of).

But the point is the CPU became a lot faster than the IO speed, including memory. So these "overdrive" CPUs were faster but not 2-4x faster.

Also, in terms of impact, yeah there was a massive incrase in performance through the 1990s but let's not forget the first consumer GPUs, namely 3dfx Voodoo and later NVidia and ATI. Oh, Matrox Millenium anyone?

It's actually kind of wild that NVidia is now a trillion dollar company. It listed in 1998 for $12/share and adjusted for splits, Google is telling me it's ~3700x now.

I don't know. I felt this way when switching from Intel laptop to Apple M1. I am still using it today and I prefer it over desktop PC.

My first pc I built was with an AMD athlon 64 4000+ and a GeForce 6600GT. Going to that from an e-machines piece of junk was INSANE. It’s so hard to come up with a similar experience shift nowadays. Even websites seemed to load instantly with the same DSL connection. Everything felt soooooo good.

You reminded me that building use to be considerably cheaper than buying.

I remember my teen years, doing odd jobs to get some cash, buying a part at a time until the build was complete. Worrying that if you didn't scrap together enough parts soon there may be an architecture change. Finally getting it all together and the feeling of pure bliss installing the OS, troubleshooting drivers, installing this or that. Good times.

GeForce 3.

"The era of exponentially rising clock speeds" was already over in 2003, when the 130-nm Pentium 4 reached 3.2GHz.

All the later CMOS fabrication processes, starting with the 90-nm process (in 2004), have provided only very small improvements in the clock frequency, so that now, 23 years later after 2003, the desktop CPUs have not reached a double clock frequency yet.

In the history of computers, the decade with the highest rate of clock frequency increase has been 1993 to 2003, during which the clock frequency has increased from 67 MHz in 1993 in the first Pentium, up to 3.2 GHz in the last Northwood Pentium 4. So the clock frequency had increased almost 50 times during that decade.

For comparison, in the previous decade, 1983 to 1993, the clock frequency in mass-produced CPUs had increased only around 5 times, i.e. at a rate about 10 times slower than in the next decade.

On the plus side, the 486DX-33 didn’t require active cooling. The second half of the 1990s was when home computing started to become noisy, and the art of trying to build silent PCs began.

It is true that we haven’t seen single core clock speeds increasing as fast, for a long while now. And I think everyone agrees that some nebulously defined “rate of computing progress” has slowed down.

But, we can be slightly less pessimistic if we’re more specific. Already by the early 90’s, a lot of the clock speed increase came from strategies like pipelines, superscalar instructions, branch prediction. Instruction level parallelism. Then in 200X we started using additional parallelism strategies like multicore and SMT.

It isn’t a meaningless distinction. There’s a real difference between parallelism that the compiler and hardware can usually figure out, and parallelism that the programmer usually has to expose.

But there’s some artificiality to it. We’re talking about the ability of parallel hardware to provide the illusion of sequential execution. And we know that if we want full “single threaded” performance, we have to think about the instruction level parallelism. It’s just implicit rather than explicit like thread-level parallelism. And the explicit parallelism is right there in any modern compiler.

If the syntax of C was slightly different, to the point where it could automatically add OpenMP pragmas to all it’s for loops, we’d have 30GHz processors by now, haha.

Clock speed increases definitely slowed down, but now that software can use parallelism better, we're seeing big wins again. Current desktop/laptop packages are doing 100 trillion operations per second. The article's processor could do one floating point op per cycle, or 1B ops. So, we've seen a 100,000x speedup in the last 25 years. That's a doubling every ~ 1.5 years since 2000.

It's not quite apples-to-apples, of course, due to floating point precision decreasing since then, vectorization, etc, but it's not like progress stopped in 2000!

The article links to a list of "The five greatest AMD CPUs". I've owned two and a half of these! Athlon XP 1800+, Ryzen 7 1700 (I had the 1800X which was just a higher bin of the same chip), and Ryzen 9 3950X.

That same article also says that extending x86 to 64 bits "wasn't hard", which I'm not so sure about. There are plenty of mistakes AMD could have made and cleanups they could have missed, but they handled it all quite well AFAICS.

> This is where it all started, kids.

Nah.. Cassettes, computers-in-a-keyboard, booting straight into BASIC.. THIS is where it all started, grandkids.

Finding high school kids with a similar "tech" background today seems really hard. Tech users, sure, chronic phone / game addicts are everywhere, but that tweaker spirit is rare

Spatial audio is pretty good these days on some titles. It's just most folks don't have a sound system that can really do much with it. Headphones can only do so much in this arena.

Couple a modern AAA title (like Battlefield 6, etc.) with a proper Atmos sound system and you will likely be pretty amazed. Even a simple 5.1 setup is pretty decent for hearing footsteps behind you/etc. which actually does help with gameplay.

I haven't kept up on it as my computer gaming area doesn't lend itself towards a proper speaker setup these days, but playing with headphones on lately has made me start to look into this again. I need to find some high quality tiny cube speakers or something to be able to put in weird spots on the ceilings/walls.

That's not going to happen, but there's alternative research such as [1] where we get rid of the clock and use self-timed circuits.

[1]:https://arc.cecs.pdx.edu/

Like any doubling rule, the buck has to stop somewhere. Higher energy usage + smaller geometry means much more exotic analog physics to worry about in chips. I’m not a silicon engineer by any means but I’d expect 10Ghz cycles will be optical or very exotically cooled or not coming at us at all.

There have been overclockers who reached 9GHz using liquid helium.

It's simply impossible at room temperatures without extreme cooling.

Also you will run into interconnect speed issues, since 10GHz corresponds to .1 nanoseconds which corresponds to 3 centimeters (assuming lightspeed, in reality this is lower).

So sadly, we'll be stuck in this "clock-speed winter" for a little longer.

None for normal.compute, since energy density is still fundamental. But the interesting option is cryogenic computing, which can have zero switching energy, and 10s of GHz clock rates

Some neat startups to watch for in this space.

The energy consumed is cv^2f. It makes no sense to keep increasing frequency as you make power way worse.

What would be the benefit? You don't need a 10GHz processor to browse the web, or edit a spreadsheet, and in any case things like that are already multi-threaded.

The current direction of adding more cores makes more sense, since this is really what CPU intensive programs generally need - more parallelism.

I bought a car radiator and dremeled out my case, visited Home Depot for all the tubes and connectors. It’s too easy nowadays to add watercooling

It's essentially random at any given moment. If I peek, mine will say it's running anywhere between 700MHz and 3.4GHz. Sometimes I think it goes even faster, but only if it's weirdly cold at the time.

In terms of marketing, the "GHz" barrier was special, because surpassing it has indeed created a lot of recognition in the general public for the fact that the AMD Athlon CPUs were better than the Intel Pentium III CPUs.

In reality, of course what you say is true and the fact that Athlon could previde a few extra hundreds of MHz in the clock frequency was not decisive.

Athlon had many improvements in microarchitecture in comparison with Pentium III, which ensured a much better performance even at equal clock frequency. For instance, Athlon was the first x86 CPU that was able to do both a floating-point multiplication and a floating-point addition in a single clock cycle. Pentium III, like all previous Intel Pentium CPUs required 2 clock cycles for this pair of operations.

This much better floating-point performance of Athlon vs. Intel contrasted with the previous generation, where AMD K6 had competitive integer performance with Intel, but its floating-point performance was well below that of the various Intel Pentium models (which had hurt its performance in some games).

AMD being competitive at the time is what mattered, but there's still technological advancement needed for them to be competitive. In this case, it was AMD using copper interconnects that allowed them to not only hit 1 GHz, but quickly clock up from there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon#Original_release

There was a time where increased clock speeds, or more generally increased processor throughput was important. I can remember when computers were slow, even for things like browsing the web (and not just because internet connection speeds were slow), and paying more for a new faster computer made sense. I think this time period may well have lasted roughly until the "GHz era" or thereabouts, after which even the cheapest, slowest, computers were all that anybody really needed, except for gamers where the the solution was a faster graphics card (which eventually lead to GPU-computing and the current AI revolution!)