Comment by jayd16
3 days ago
We have self driving cars, amazing advancement in computer graphics, dead reckoning of camera position from visual input...
In the meantime, hardware has had to go wide on threads as single core performance has not improved. You could argue that's been a software gain and a hardware failure.
> single core performance has not improved.
Single core performance has improved, but at a much slower rate than I experienced as a kid.
Over the last 10 years, we are something like 120% improvement in single core performance.
And, not for nothing, efficiency has become much more important. More CPU performance hasn't been a major driving factor vs having a laptop that runs for 12 hours. It's simply easier to add a bunch of cores and turn them all off (or slow them down) to gain power efficiency.
Not to say the performance story would be vastly different with more focus on performance over efficiency. But I'd say it does have an effect on design choices.
300% single core performance from Haswell (2015) to today.
Single core performance has improved about 10x in 20 years