CPUs aren’t getting faster clock speeds and they aren’t getting more cores. How are they improving in performance?
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a couple of things. first performance really was increasing very slowly recently, there’s been a slight increase recently with amd hitting their stride.
various things are helping, memory is getting faster, pci is getting faster, graphics cards have been getting *much* faster. io has been getting faster, especially with spinning disk to ssd to m.2. so all the peripheral stuff has been improving markedly, which improves the computer overall.
cpus main improvement has been in instructions per clock: the average number of instructions that are completed every clock tick. this has been going up by improving cache speed and structure, as well as architectural improvements with pipelining instructions, completing them out of order, having multiple compute units (within each core) and various kinds of compute unit that do far more and more complex calculations, like sse that performs an instruction on multiple values at the same time.
a fair overview of a modern CPUs internals:
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