[tobyhinloopen]

Death of moore’s law? Hmm. Meanwhile I just got a R9 5950X and it is drastically faster than my 5 year old i7.

There must be some doubling of transistors in there, right?

Also maybe buying a 5950X at the birth of a new generation of ARM CPUs wasn’t the wisest choice.

Or maybe it is, idk.

[Retric]

Mores Law as originally stated said transistor density doubled every 18-24 months. Using larger CPU’s for example let’s you have more transistors, but has nothing to do with Mores Law.

Clearly density has kept increasing, but the law refers to a rate of increase that we haven’t been able to meet. The original 386 released in 1985 had 275,000 transistors, using the slowest interpretation we would need to be at (2^18) = ~72+ Billion transistors today or (2^17) = 36+ Billion in 2019 which is close, but the chip would also need to be the size of a 386 which they aren’t.

AMD Epyc Rome is 1008 mm^2 vs a 386 at 104 mm^2. The M1 is 119 mm^2, but it’s only 16 Billion Transistors. As such it’s safe to say Mores Law is dead.

[warmwaffles]

Did Mores Law take into account 3D density or was it just single layer compactness?

[Retric]

It’s per wafer area. Which effectively compresses the full 3D nature of modern chips into a 2D structure.

[simonh]

Back in the old days you'd get that sort of improvement in 2-3 years, not 5. I used to expect at least a 4x improvement on my last machine every time I upgraded.

[Cthulhu_]

Yeah, I bought myself a new PC two years ago or so to replace a 5+ year old one, and the difference was... okay? If it was twice as fast (mostly for gaming) I'd already be impressed.

Whereas back when (thinking of early 90's) you'd upgrade every three years and be taking massive leaps forward. 10x increase in disk space (40 MB to 500 MB), or going from diskettes (~1.5 MB? I don't even remember) to CD's (650MB). We went from Wolfenstein to Half-Life in just six years (it felt longer).

[floatboth]

Maybe buying a 5950X at the birth of DDR5, PCIeGen5 and TSMC's 5nm wasn't the wisest choice. Ehhhh seems like all that new stuff would still take lots of time to actually get ready, and the 5950X is the best CPU now.

[tobyhinloopen]

Ah well at least I can now run my test suite 3 times faster compared to my 16” i9 macbook pro so I’m happy.

From 60s to 20s every run is huge for me.

[jbverschoor]

I expect the new 16" / 14" to have dual M1 cpus. It would solve the number of external display issue. Also, it would bump the RAM to 32GB.

Then the next step, a new Mac Pro, would have up to 4 M1 CPU's. Sounds very sweet to me.

[floatboth]

No way the M1 supports "dual socket" configurations. Absolutely no way a configuration like that would "combine" the GPUs and display outputs. I'd bet money on Apple releasing a larger monolithic "M1X" or whatever for the large MBPs.

[floatboth]

Is that stock, PBO or manual OC? It's quite wattage limited at stock, you might go significantly under 20s with PBO :D

[arvinsim]

5950x is the last greatest chip on the AMD4 platform. I think their would be enough demand for it in the future for the price to stay high.