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Clock speed increases definitely slowed down, but now that software can use parallelism better, we're seeing big wins again. Current desktop/laptop packages are doing 100 trillion operations per second. The article's processor could do one floating point op per cycle, or 1B ops. So, we've seen a 100,000x speedup in the last 25 years. That's a doubling every ~ 1.5 years since 2000.

It's not quite apples-to-apples, of course, due to floating point precision decreasing since then, vectorization, etc, but it's not like progress stopped in 2000!



Arguably, GPUs wouldn't have risen as fast as they did had clock speed kept scaling.

Parallelism was pretty much the only way to get an increase in performance in the last 20 years.


Web browsing is still largely single/few-threaded in practice, afaik. (Right?)


Actually, no. Disable GPU acceleration and your ad blocker. Make sure JS and everything else is turned on.

It doesn't matter how fast your machine is; you won't be able to read the news, etc, on consumer sites without a bunch of GPU + shader cores, etc to render the ads.




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