| sc94597 said: While I can certainly see his strict observation of transistor count doubling every 18 months reaching its limit (as it has already begun), I don't think it spells the end for improvements. People are just starting to get the hang of multiple cores after the ten or so years they've been on the market, and the architectures are improving quite a bit. Nevertheless, we still have some breathing room in terms of transistor size to push a little bit futher. |
It doesn't but it's the beginning of a new stagnation ...
| sc94597 said: I'll admit that Geekbench doesn't really tell quantitative relationships very well, but it does do a decent job ordinally (i.e it tells which is better than which when they aren't close.) All of the benchmarks I have run on my various devices (phones, netbooks, laptops, gaming desktops, htpcs) seem to fit quite well with other documentation on relative CPU performance. At the very least the current Iphone has matched the low-end laptop CPU's. Furthermore, since we are talking about jaguar-based CPU's (in consoles) I see no problem with comparing it to broadwell, both of which are low-end, but the latter with a much better IPC. |
@Bold It really doesn't. In fact the A9X (which is the bigger version of the A9 used in the iphone 6s) often gets hammered by a Core M. Linus Torvalds derides Geekbench for a very good reason ...
As per the last line I meant that they were targeting lower clocked (1.1/1.2GHz) Broadwell parts instead of comparing it to every variant that it has to offer at that power range ...
| sc94597 said: I think it will start out as (relatively) stagnant, but there is more money and effort than ever to find alternatives to die shrinks for performance improvements. And since Intel has a much smaller market control than in the past, there are more companies working on these alternatives and competing. |
There's certainly more effort but we're nowhere near close to reaping the benefits of that investment. Transistors will be here for the next decade at the LEAST ...
| sc94597 said: We already have had plenty of breakthroughs in the last five years or so. The only thing preventing their application is cost, but considering how everything has become much more mobile over time, there is a greater demand to solve the cost problem. I'd bet we'll see things like micro-supercapacitors entering mobile devices (or at least starting to) in the next ten years. That solves a lot of the heat problem as these capacitors have much greater power-densities than standard batteries, and can deal with higher temperatures better. When you can charge your power source in a matter of seconds energy density becomes much less of an issue. Even still, they are also moderately closing the energy density gap (see: below.) Just because the technology has remain stagnant for 25 years does not mean it will continue to remain so. There is a lot of money to be made in replacing the quite piss-poor battery technology we have currently, and tons of people trying to solve this problem on both the scientific and economic ends. I think it will happen very much like the transition from mechanical HDD's to SSD's (the first being a standard for decades as well, and is briskly being replaced as SSD's become cheaper.) http://phys.org/news/2015-09-micro-supercapacitor-unmatched-energy-storage.html or just a few days ago |
@Bold It's not because cost is an issue, it's that no researchers in the laboratories has made any viable prototypes meant for daily use! Cost is a small issue as tech giants in the industry like to pick on low hanging fruits ...
There's tons of technology that have stagnated for a long while. The engine that you see in your car isn't all that different from 5 decades ago in terms of concept. Your kitchen appliances haven't exactly advanced all that much and neither has your central heating system ...
The transition from mechanical storage to solid state storage has been painful to say the least. I think you might be overestimating just how powerful we are at innovating ...
