![]() And there’s no sign that these types of gains will cease in future CPU architectures. There are tests where the two CPUs perform identically, but they’re not the norm outside of specific categories like gaming.Īn 18 percent average improvement over several years is a far cry from the gains we used to see, but it isn’t nothing, either. The average performance boost for Skylake was 1.18x over IVB in those eight applications, ranging from 1.07x in WinRAR to 1.38x in the first x264 Handbrake pass. Spectre in particular may represent a larger problem, but it’s not so large as to justify concluding there are few-to-no ways of improving performance in the future. Spectre and Meltdown aren’t the first security patches that can impact performance when Data Execution Prevention rolled out with Windows XP SP2 and AMD’s Athlon 64, there were cases where users had to disable it to make applications perform properly or at desired speed. The history of computing is definitionally a history of change. It took years, but ultimately, RISC “won” the computing market and transformed it in the process. While x86 is officially considered a CISC architecture, all x86 CPUs translate x86 instructions into simplified, RISC-like micro-ops internally. Instead of focusing on code density and instructions that might take many clock cycles to execute, engineers found it more profitable to build CPUs with more general-purpose registers, a load/store architecture, and simpler instructions that could execute in one cycle. The CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) CPUs of the 1960s to 1980s relied on single instructions that could execute a multi-step operation partly because both RAM and storage were extremely expensive, even compared with the cost of the processor itself.Īs RAM and storage costs dropped and clock speeds increased, design constraints changed. This isn’t the first time CPU engineers have considered profound changes to how CPUs function in order to plug security holes or improve performance. Why Meltdown, Spectre, Aren’t the End of CPU Performance Improvements In short, it’s inaccurate to refer to Meltdown and Spectre ending “Moore’s Law.” But since references to Moore’s Law are still generally used as shorthand for “improved computer performance,” it’s an understandable usage and we’ll engage with the larger question. The ability to deploy memory like HBM2 on a CPU package is a further example of how improving integration technology has improved overall system performance. This type of integration and density improvements in SoCs in general has continued apace and will not end at any point in the next few years, at least. Later, as SoCs became common, it’s meant features like onboard GPUs, cellular and Wi-Fi radios, I/O blocks, and PCI Express lanes. ![]() Initially, this meant additional CPU cores, at least in the desktop and laptop space. ![]() Moore’s Law 3.0 has focused on integrating other components. This version of Moore’s Law essentially ended in 2005. While the Pentium 4 Northwood wasn’t as efficient, clock-for-clock, as Intel’s older Pentium 3, it incorporated many architectural enhancements and improvements compared with the original Pentium, including support for SIMD instructions, an on-die full speed L2 cache, and out-of-order execution. From 1993 – 2003, clock speeds increased from 66MHz to 3.2GHz, an improvement of 48.5x in nine years. From 1978 to 1993, clock speeds increased from 5MHz (8086) to 66MHz (original Pentium), a gain of 13.2x in 15 years. ![]() Moore’s Law 2.0 focused on scaling up performance by sending clock speeds rocketing into the stratosphere. Mark Pesce writes: “or the mainstay of IT, general purpose computing, last month may be as good as it ever gets.”ĭensity, clock speed, TDP, and IPC scaling across time. That’s the opinion of The Register, which has gloomily declared that these flaws represent nothing less than the end of performance improvements in general purpose compute hardware. But in the wake of these revelations, we’ve seen various people opining that the flaws meant the end of either the x86 architecture or, now, that it’s the final death knell for Moore’s law. Even if the performance penalties fall hardest on older CPUs or server workloads, instead of workstation, gaming, or general-purpose compute, there are going to be cases where certain customers have to eat a performance hit to close the security gap. Both AMD and Intel will have to redesign how their CPUs function to fully address the problem. Spectre, in particular, is going to be difficult to mitigate. Spectre and Meltdown are two of the most significant security issues to surface since the beginning of this millennium. ![]()
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