UnderTow wrote on Mon, 01 May 2006 19:27 |
danlavry wrote on Mon, 01 May 2006 17:36 |
Hi Karl,
I am not talking about Moore's law over the last 30 years. That was not my question at all.
I am talking about it in the context of the LAST 3 YEARS.
I was talking specifically about clock speed.
Again, if you plot a curve of clock speed improvements in the last, say 25 years, the last 3 years seem "flat" to me.
Regards Dan Lavry
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Hi Dan,
Moore's law doesn't mention clock speeds. Here are all the details on Mr Moore's prediction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
Anyway, clock speeds are not a relevant measure of computing power. Much more important is the speed of calculations measured in FLOPS (Floating point Operations Per Second) or MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second).
Different CPUs of similar clock speeds can have very different FLOPS or MIPS ratings. For instance, an AMD FX-60 running at 2.6 Ghz is faster than even the very fastest Intel processor running at 3.8 Ghz.
To show how irrelevant clock speeds have become, AMD didn't even make a press announcement when they broke their own 3Ghz barrier by releasing their first CPUs running at 3 Ghz a couple of weeks ago.
Clockspeeds are so 20th century.
Anyway, with the advent of dual-core processors, I reckon that over the last 5 years, the computing industry has bested Moore's law.
Alistair
PS: I just checked te "Cost of computing" paragraph on that Wikipedia page and it says: Cost per GFLOPS in May 2000: 640$, Cost of GFLOPS in February 2006: 1$. We are way beyond Moore's law.
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There are many possible factors for limiting compute speed, and they are APPLICATION DEPENDENT. One piece of software may demands fast hard drive, and the processor speed is almost insignificant. Another piece of software demands real fast video. Something else may be limited by how fast one can write and read to ram...
And then some applications that rely heavily on a bunch of computations that are done INSIDE the CPU, DO DEPEND ON CLOCK SPEED. Not all software that is mostly done inside the CPU requires the ultimate in clock speed, but some applications do!
So please put aside my reference to Moore's law. My point is strictly about clock speed.
I am not a computer guru, but I know just about everything that was said here, it is really very fundamental to any EE. I am well aware of the various tests used over the years, for comparison in compute speed, and in fact I too performed some of the benchmark tests. So I know that a hard drive intensive task calls for a very fast hard drive. I also understand that dual core is great for many things. I know that risk machines have some pluses, I know about the ups and downs of parallel processing...
And then there are the few cases where hard drive speed does no good, the video can be slow like molasses, the front bus speed is not going to help that much... because you are doing a lot of iterative computations inside the cpu. I happened to need such a fast clock.
A statement that clock speed does not matter is a gross generalization. It may hold true for the majority of cases, but it is not a general truth.
Again, there are many ways to improve computing. Some are about system architecture, some are about speed of data transfer from and to a CPU, a hard drive, ram.... and clock speed is one of those issues. What I said is: I am surprised that it did not go up that much in the last 3 years. I believe it was near 3GHz for a desktop and around 2GHz for a laptop. I do not think it moved up much lately.
Regards
Dan Lavry