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by yellowapple 2402 days ago
Yep. My top-of-the-line Threadripper 1950X is already multiple generations behind the bleeding edge; I built that machine last year, and there are already newer CPUs blowing it out of the water.

It reminds me of the 90's when Moore's Law was still a Law-with-a-capital-L and I love it.
1 comments
KirinDave 2402 days ago
Other than benchmarks, do you actually feel this? Dev environments have gone to great lengths to reduce the total amount of compilation required and for nearly every other application, a GPU does most of the work. And if you've got a lot of ML to do, you probably would save more time with a TPU.

I don't really see what the point of faster desktop CPUs are without being accompanied by substantial power use reduction. I'm a software engineer and other than when I'm lazy about my Haskell build process and dont offload it to a farm, it doesnt really seem to matter at all. It doesnt come into play with my CAD work, and it doesn't make my Java GC cycles faster.

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yellowapple 2402 days ago
You're right that the individual tasks don't feel much faster. What's impressive and more relevant to me is that I can do more of them at the same time. I can have Firefox open on a bunch of tabs and a resource-intensive video game or CAD program running and Spotify and Slack and a bunch of Emacs windows and a bunch of terminal and file manager windows and even a couple VMs all at the same time, and can Alt-Tab freely among them (or even put them on separate monitors). My desktop doesn't break a sweat in the process. My previous desktop (with an early-gen i7) could handle a fraction of that under the same operating system (Slackware). My desktops before that under any operating system handled even less, as do most laptops even today.

And that's with 16 cores. The 3990X is gonna have four times that many. That's four times the number of things my computer can be doing at the same time at the same per-core load.

My work laptop, according to htop, is running 263 "tasks" right now (which I assume to be processes+threads). If AMD can in the next few years pull off another quadrupling like they're trying to do with the 3990X, then I'd be very close to being able to give every process and thread on a computer its own x86 core. That's fucking ludicrous.

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