That's funny but this actually will give decent performance bumps.
Other fields will receive a noticeable performance bump from this as well. Anything that does number crunching or math. Any type of rendering photos, videos, audio, or CAD.
Agreed. I just am amused by framing the performance gain in terms of entertainment rather than productivity. All my PCs are at least 5-8 years old now, with some running Windows 7 still. Every now and then, I take peeks at new hardware wondering if it's time to upgrade. I'm disappointed at CPU specs still running in the single digit Ghz speeds. It's just now you get 8-32 core processors. Most of my tools don't use more than one core at a time, so a 3-4 Ghz CPU is all I can hope for.
The reason that cores still run at single digits is because of physical production limits, heat, and power consumption.
IBM (PowerPC) and Intel realized this over a decade ago when working on massive core prototypes that ran way too hot & hungry. This is why everything went multi-core parallel processing instead.
Once the cores start hitting 5ghz they get seriously hot. IBM holds the production record releasing a chip with cores running at 5.5ghz.
At 6ghz or higher they need liquid cooling.
As of 2011, the Guinness World Record for the highest CPU clock rate is 8.42938 GHz on an AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer-based chip.
Thanks. Great post. What I notice is manufacturers opt for incremental performance boosts in peripherals like bus, memory, disk, cache, graphics co-processing, etc. It all helps, but Moore's law hit a wall.
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