[uncle_j]

Every few years something like this gets written. I remember similar things being written in 2004-2005 before the Core 2 line of processors came out.

There is still improvements being made to the current tech or new takes on the current tech that aren't incorporated yet in the current bunch of consumer processors.

Also I happen to think that what makes a computer fast is the removal of bottlenecks in the hardware. You can take quite an old machine (I have a Core 2 Quad machine under my desk) slap in an SSD and suddenly it doesn't feel much slower than my Ryzen 3 machine.

[gameswithgo]

except now it has actually been true for years. clock rates aren't increasing. advances in performance have been only from things that are tricky for developers to efficiently leverage (cache, simd, more cores). We need developers who understand these new low level details as much now as we needed that kind of developer in the past.

[uncle_j]

> except now it has actually been true for years

Sure it is true. It isn't a tech journo writing a quick piece to get some clicks. I am quite cynical these days.

There hasn't been any competition in the Desktop CPU space for years until 2019.

Also clock rates haven't increased since the mid-2000s (there were 5ghz P4 chips). Clock rates being an indication of speed stopped being a thing back then when I could buy a "slower" clocked Athlon XP chip that was comparable to a P4 with a faster clock.

Also more stuff is getting offloaded from the CPU to custom chips (usually the GPU).

> We need developers who understand these new low level details as much now as we needed that kind of developer in the past.

I suspect that there will get better compiler and languages. I work with .NET stuff and the performance increase from a rewrite to .NET core is ridiculous.

[ahartmetz]

Minor correction about desktop CPUs: Ryzen 1 came out in Q1/Q2 2017. Initial problems were mostly solved by 2018.

[pdimitar]

> Sure it is true. It isn't a tech journo writing a quick piece to get some clicks. I am quite cynical these days.

It might be such a piece and it could still be true.

[wongarsu]

Most things we do now aren't inherently more computationally demanding than what we did 20 years ago.

[markrages]

I first heard this when I was in school in the mid nineties.