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by hakfoo 285 days ago
We sort of had two phases of development:

- Running up single-core performance through increasingly sophisticated core design and clock speed (which is now at the 5% per year point mentioned)

- Going wider by throwing more SMT, more cores, and larger caches at the problem.

Assuming here that x86 was the last major architecture that was going for high single-thread performance at all costs, the first phase lasted us a good 30 years-- from the 4004 to the flameout of Netburst.

We could consider the second phase starting when they started delivering the P4 with Hyperthreading, and its true-dual-core predecessors shortly thereafter, so we're now about 20 years into that era.

Do we have another 10 left in it?