[horsawlarway]

This isn't an crazy statement (cpu performance metrics have mostly stalled their meteoric rise from prior to the 2000s)

But it also doesn't capture the entire picture.

CPU metrics mostly stalled for two reasons.

1. There wasn't much demand for the extra capacity. Even low end cpus from a decade ago are plenty capable for just browsing the web and typing up documents. It takes a novel use-case to drive demand again (or a desire to do things like play new games).

2. The interest in CPU development shifted in response to mobile. Given point #1 and the state of battery development.... the blocker wasn't "performance". It was "performance per watt". And on that metric you couldn't be more wrong.

Since ~2005, MIPS per watt has improved 15x to 30x.

Also - fun news is that the traditional CPU pipeline really isn't the bottleneck for AI workloads. So we're going to see incredible interest in things like memory bandwidth and other inference related hardware bottlenecks, which haven't already been optimized.

[BeetleB]

> There wasn't much demand for the extra capacity. Even low end cpus from a decade ago are plenty capable for just browsing the web and typing up documents.

It stalled before the rise of PC-as-Internet-portal.

I bought a high end PC in 2003, and 5 years later the PCs were not much faster - probably not even 2x. Around 2008-2010 was when most people started using PCs as a way to connect to the Internet.

It stalled because scaling got a lot more challenging. Not because of lack of demand.

[horsawlarway]

Yes, but it only stalled along a single dimension - Single core clock speed.

I was building gaming machines in the early 2000s, I absolutely remember the 4ghz wall that cpus hit.

But it wasn't a real wall... because we then got one of the arguably most influential processors ever in the Core 2 duo. Which... blew the limit away by giving you two processors clocked at 2.93 GHz each.

And honestly, even then - it was lack of demand (we could go to 4+ghz, but we didn't want to pay the power bill for the rest of the system - the planned pentium 5 was 7-10ghz on paper, but they canceled the project because keeping it fed and cool was too hard for personal desktop machines).

Of Note - we did reach these speeds on consumer hardware (ex - in 2012, Andre Yang hit 8.794Ghz on an AMD FX-8350)

So it was never "impossible" to keep scaling. It just wasn't worth it compared to going multi-core.

---

And maybe it's because I was in my formative years at this time, but you're off by 5+ years with this:

> Around 2008-2010 was when most people started using PCs as a way to connect to the Internet.

Gmail was a web only email client released in 2004. Wikipedia was released in 2001. Web browsing was very much one of the "killer" apps for computers by the 2000s. What do you think the damn 2000s dot-com bubble crash was?

at the risk of aging myself - I was born in '89, and I literally do not remember a time where we didn't have DSL speeds and above (friends houses often still had dial-up until ~2005, though).

[BeetleB]

> Gmail was a web only email client released in 2004

Well, Gmail was actually one of the last web based email clients people used :-) Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and so many others predate Gmail by years.

> Web browsing was very much one of the "killer" apps for computers by the 2000s.

One of them. People still used non-browser apps for all kinds of things: Media consumption (people didn't watch movies on Youtube), Office (Google Docs was very much a niche thing for many years), photo-editing (lots of pirated versions of Photoshop/Lightroom years after the iPhone release), etc.

Most non-mail, non-social media, non-shopping stuff people do on the web these days was a dedicated SW from the vendor in those days. Want to make a photobook? Download this Windows binary and set it up there. It will then communicate with the server for the order (no browser utilized).

> at the risk of aging myself - I was born in '89, and I literally do not remember a time where we didn't have DSL speeds and above (friends houses often still had dial-up until ~2005, though).

Spring chicken! My first online experience was on a 340 baud modem :-)