How are there new CPUs, if the technological limit has already been achieved?

[TheFlash1300]

Hello. Can someone explain to me what new features do new CPUs have? For example, what is the difference between AMD's overkill (best) CPU of the year 2021, and AMD's overkill (best) CPU of the year 2022?

If the clock rate (GHz) no longer grows, and the number of transistors no longer grows, because the limit of Moore's law has already been reached, or it's very close to being reached, how exactly are the new CPUs better than older CPUs?

If the clock rate and the number of transistors is what makes CPUs better, and the clock rate and the number of transistors no longer grow, how are new CPUs better than old(er) CPUs? How are the best CPUs of 2020 better than the best CPUs of 2021?

 

[USAFRet]

It is far more than just the clock rate.
IPC (Instructions Per Clock) keeps getting better.

CPU A can do 50 things per clock cycle, and CPU B can do 75 things per clock cycle....CPU B is "better", at the same clock speed.

 

[Ralston18]

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[TheFlash1300]

It is far more than just the clock rate.
IPC (Instructions Per Clock) keeps getting better.

CPU A can do 50 things per clock cycle, and CPU B can do 75 things per clock cycle....CPU B is "better", at the same clock speed.

Okay, thanks for explaining this to me. I didn't even know there are IPCs.

 

[USAFRet]

Okay, thanks for explaining this to me. I didn't even know there are IPCs.

We've had 4GHz CPUs since Pentium IV days, over 15 years ago.

Put a P IV up against a current i7...no contest.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Pentium-4-3.73GHz-vs-Intel-i7-12700KF/1080vs4608

 

[TheFlash1300]

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What is said is not just a blind guess. There are roadmaps and studies suggesting that Moore's law will reach its limit around the year 2025. You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

 

[USAFRet]

What is said is not just a blind guess. There are roadmaps and studies suggesting that Moore's law will reach its limit around the year 2025. You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

No so long ago, it was said that a 1TB HDD was the limit.

Currently, I have a 16TB and 18TB in my NAS. Among the other 3/4/8TB drives.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Hello. Can someone explain to me what new features do new CPUs have? For example, what is the difference between AMD's overkill (best) CPU of the year 2021, and AMD's overkill (best) CPU of the year 2022?

If the clock rate (GHz) no longer grows, and the number of transistors no longer grows, because the limit of Moore's law has already been reached, or it's very close to being reached, how exactly are the new CPUs better than older CPUs?

If the clock rate and the number of transistors is what makes CPUs better, and the clock rate and the number of transistors no longer grow, how are new CPUs better than old(er) CPUs? How are the best CPUs of 2020 better than the best CPUs of 2021?

Unless there was a processor based on a new architecture, the differences between years is mostly how many cores and frequency. But otherwise if you want to know what changed from say Zen 2 to Zen 3: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/microarchitectures/zen_3#Key_changes_from_Zen_2

But to answer the question overall, it's not simply about transistors and clock speed, it's about how you use those transistors. If we look at raw performance alone, a 64-core Zen 2 EPYC uses about 33.2 billion transistors for the CPU elements and can spit out about 6.758 TFLOPS. A Radeon RX 6900 XT can achieve 18.688 TLFOPS but is made out of 26.8 billion transistors. How? Because video cards spend more of their transistors on compute than processing instructions.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

I wouldn’t worry about Moore’s law which isn’t even a law anyway more like somebody’s observation. Nothing more (pun intended) and a simple guesstimate at that

 

[chalabam]

No so long ago, it was said that a 1TB HDD was the limit.

Currently, I have a 16TB and 18TB in my NAS. Among the other 3/4/8TB drives.

To be fair, the advance in HDD was much faster before 1 Tb, in part, because the switch to SSD definanced HDD

On my case, the largest HDD I have is still 1Tb, because I added lots of laptops HDD recycled from SSD upgrades, So I have piles of unused 500GB/1TB HDD

 

[hotaru.hino]

To be fair, the advance in HDD was much faster before 1 Tb, in part, because the switch to SSD definanced HDD

SSDs wouldn't really be mainstream until 2015 or so, and by mainstream, they came standard in commodity computesr (or at least as relatively "cheap" upgrade option). I mean heck, I included a hard drive in my builds simply because I want a separate place for data and that data doesn't benefit from being on an SSD.

The only thing slowing down progress is the exponential growth in effort it takes to figuratively chop a thing in half when you've done it 100 times already.