logoalt Hacker News

hedorayesterday at 4:37 PM1 replyview on HN

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!


Replies

lysaceyesterday at 5:15 PM

Web browsing is still largely single/few-threaded in practice, afaik. (Right?)