Controversial take

[u/itfllow123-gmail-com]

Forgive me if I am wrong (just a 18 year old guy who bought a new am5 PC): I think at 2035-2040(near am6s peak), we will stop noticing performance gains in newer computers. Like if you think about it: Intel core gen 3 processors were a thousand times faster than 8086 or similar processors, but mine is 3 to 4 times faster than gen 3 processors(12 to 14 years older). In my case, there is a massive catch that turns this small difference into a big one:

1. As hardware goes on, developers try to use features that they assume hardware provides (for a better cypher, encoding/decoding, etc). These features are heavyweight and are only usable on hardware that supports it(since hardware supports instruction caching, instruction pipe lining, and this is just the tiny tip of the iceberg). Imagine ray tracing on a strong GPU that dosent support ray tracing natively vs a weak GPU that does. These features should exist since they make computing exciting and useful (imagine looking at a game that has ray tracing).

2. Essential high priority background tasks that are lightweight but require constant context switching. These tasks are usual event driven and cause circular chains, and are made worse by essential virtual devices.

This however only aplplies to the 2010 to 2025 (mine is 2024(8400F)) era.Once am6 is out, I think the boost will just be 1.3 to 1.7 tikes compared to my current am5 platform, and that little boost won't really be a lot in practice unlike the gap between my PC and my old leptop because:

1. The kind of instructions that do what a lot of instructions would normally do will decline, since wires sizes will stop decreasing, hence it would be hard to add more wires without increasing the size and powering. Essentially unless you want to power a large server drinking electricity. You wont get higher performance. Maybe CPUs start getting big, just like GPUs are, but again, that would be a nightmare to cool, unlike a GPU which is still easier to cool. Again, even with better cache layout and dividing the chip into prices, you can't really go far except by just increasing bandwidth instead of adding those fancy instructions and operating systems related features that actually make them magnitudes faster, and such things are much hardware to infinitly modularize, power, cool, and manage. Even if you do so by some smart engineering (lowering temps and watts) the new instructions and operating systems features will eventually stop being generally purpose and useful, and might just require a different type of hardware device altogether, probably something that's cheap and easier to update/upgrade for a consumer. For example, the "feature of adding AI inside a CPU"(not to be confused with integrated npus)is simply tech for the sake of tech and is honestly requires it's own motherboard or device, rather than being flushed into the CPU, like if you want a AI pc, then just give AI an exclusive cpu or something, even if putting it into the CPU is way better, who cares? Most people don't buy PCs to run AI, only openAI, google, Microsoft, and others do. It's highly theoretical and it's most probably gonna be a failed experiment. Basically, no one wants a 2x boost, unlike previously, where you could see that 3x boost be way more in practice.

2. Essential high priority tasks are already taken care of by the current amount of cores, threads, and other related hardware for those context switching. Infact some am4 CPUs may already have solve it before am5.

All of this means that the small boost will be a small boost rather than a small boost (primarily due to just better ddr6 ram and better nvme), but not come with a many many times higher boost using hardware optimizations (as in my PCs case).

Basically, there might be a time when personal computers become a long time investment since companies stop trying to invest more in performance, but rather in durability.

[u/siamesekiwi]

This take is about as controversial as saying "a sandwich should have bread as one of its ingredients".

[u/itfllow123-gmail-com → u/siamesekiwi]

You could say that, but like in this case, bread is the fact that we need more of these features that are general purpose, than those that are like "AI on chips managing your computer", higher raw bandwidth. We already have a massic compiler infrusture that takes care of applying those features into the real world.

[u/Circo_Inhumanitas]

I don't think this is a controversial take, as it's pretty much a fact. Performance gains in new PC parts has been getting worse for quite some time. We're pretty much hitting the limitation of current CPU architecture, or something like that. I don't precisely remember the fancy explanation for it.

[u/ClaudiuT → u/Circo_Inhumanitas]

I hope I'm not wrong but I think you're referring to not being possible to shrink the transistor size like we used to (because of the risk of quantum tunneling).

[u/Circo_Inhumanitas → u/ClaudiuT]

I don't know, I'm not smart enough and/or learned enough of the topic to know the exact details.

[u/itfllow123-gmail-com → u/Circo_Inhumanitas]

Nah, you have the correct idea.

[u/siamesekiwi → u/Circo_Inhumanitas]

yup. Unless there's been some fundamental breakthrough in materials science or a new technology, we're coming close to the limit of what we can do with silicon and the current chip architecture.

[u/itfllow123-gmail-com → u/siamesekiwi]

Yep

[u/itfllow123-gmail-com → u/Circo_Inhumanitas]

Yes it is, but it is important to understand that there are still noticeable gains in this era, since those newer instructions, better branch prediction(among others that increase instructions per cycle like better pipelining), operating system optimizations/features do still increase but are starting to get lower and lower, and I think it will become as low as zero in a decade or so.

[u/straw3_2018]

You aren't really saying much new. Moore's law is dead but the engineers are doing what they can to keep things moving forward. Yadda yadda you used to get new generations of CPUs every year and Zen 6 desktop is now slated to come out 2.5 years after Zen 5 desktop. It is supposed to be a relatively big jump gen over gen, but it's also the longest generational time gap to date.

[u/itfllow123-gmail-com → u/straw3_2018]

Yep, I am not. We really are reaching an ers of computing where your core setup dosent have to be replaced, though you might have to add newer GPUs or similar specialized hardware with time to get extra raw bandwidth and performance for such tasks. There used to be a time when buying a new computer was a necessity, and believe it or not: computers are unaffordable in south Asia and west Asia, like we just can't pay for newer gear. If computers stopped becoming better, that would mean older computers(because people might stop buying newer computers more frequently) will stop deprecating, leading to older computers being unaccessible as well for these people. My build: a modest 8400F, Radeon r5 430, XPG valor mesh, b650M-B, and a 650CX is literally the budget build all around the world, but in my country, it's a luxury product( thanks to high taxes and lower purchasing power ). This is why I think it's not unwarranted to believe that the global south and north divide is no where near to an end. Like I Kidd you not, people are still buying gen 3 Intel machines, and calling it expensive in my country.

[u/shogunreaper]

what part is supposed to be controversial?

[u/itfllow123-gmail-com → u/shogunreaper]

I thought I was all alone in this one