On 12/07/18 08:50, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Jul 2018 08:27:24 +0100
> The Natural Philosopher  wrote:
>
>> Well I knew that already. More to the point it looks like increasing
>> memory speed is also at an end.
>
>  The writing was on the wall for that when CPU cycle times went down
> much faster than memory access times.
>
>> And although HD=>SSD was a huge step up, thats pretty much done and
>> dusted.
>
>  It looked that way just before NVMe, I saw some discussions around
> the possibility that DRAM may become obsolete with NVMe SSDs filling cache
> lines directly.

Yes. That makes sense BUT it wont actually make e.g. my desktop any
faster because it spends almost no time now on IO wait


>
>> Only one place left to go. Tackle bloatware :-)
>
>  Nope there's still power consumption to attack or rather being
> attacked. Run your mind back to the time a bleeding edge PC was about as
> powerful as a RPi3 and consumed the thick end of a hundred watts.
>

Yes, but that has not much further to go either. It is an expression
somewhat of morres law. As gate size gets smaller so too dpoes te power,
exspecially if the clock rate is lowered

ARM is economical because there wasn't a lot in it, because Acorn could
not afford a bigger gate array to build it on


>  Big data centres don't particularly need faster processors or
> faster memory they already hold tens of thousands of processors and
> hundreds of thousands of discs - they do need denser storage and lower
> power consumption.
>

And they will get that a bit.

Certainly virtualisation has stripped machine rooms of vast quantities
of tin that was mostly idle, consuming power.

I.e. what I an saying is that there ain't no low hanging fruit left,
although sime is, agreed, lower than others



--
"In our post-modern world, climate science is not powerful because it is
true: it is true because it is powerful."

Lucas Bergkamp

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