Any significant advancement in computing power ahead?

I keep looking for the latest and best technology and have noticed that for the last several years there has not been any real significant leaps. A little over a year ago I bought my Sager (9890, XP Pro P4(3.8Ghz) 800Mhz FSB, Nvidea7900GTX, 3GB 533Mhz DDR2, 2 x SATA 100GB 7200rpm, raid 0)
and aside from some better front side bus & ram numbers, the processor clock speeds actually went backward when the dual and quad core chips came out. I have compared my system with results from the quad core system and was suprised to find only marginal improvement. Certainly not enough to warrent upgrading even compared to my older 9860 sager and that goes back allmost 3 years. seems like the days of going from 1 gig processors to alllmost 4 gig processors in the span of two or three years are over.
Will we ever see those days again or are we leveling out?

 

Well ... there's this

 

You have much much to learn about computers if that's what your belief is about processors...

Just to give you a clue:

A 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo mobile cpu will absolutely spank your current processor in terms of raw power (and it's half the speed of your P4). Not only that, but there are two (2) of them.

GPU, memory and hard drive wise, yes there haven't been many great leaps in terms of power. But cpus have gone wayyyy more powerful.

 

I'd say there have been some pretty significant improvements in GPUs in the past 3 years, too. Hard-drives and memory are still kind of meh (especially since the higher speed memory seems to be almost worthless as far as real-world boosts go), but CPUs and GPUs have made some significant improvements.

 

Look at these results.

http://www.aaarchitect.com/archicad_benchmarks.htm

My older 9860 @ 3.6 GHz is top of the list for archicad version 9 and there are several 2.0GHz Core 2 processors here and they aren't spanking anything.

To me the real test is how long I have to wait for the 3D view of my project

 

Well, the only reason for that is that ver.9 isn´t taking advantage of a dual core architecture. I had a P4 3.2ghz (with hyper-threading of course), and i can tell you that my renders in 3dsmax using v-ray are absolutely faster with my mobile Core2Duo 2.2ghz.

 

There are a few other things to look at as well. Most benchmarks are looking at the raw speeds of one task running and how fast that one task is performed. With the newer CPU's you can more things at the same time at not see a decrease in speeds. They also let you switch between applications without huge system delays allow you to do more with your time than just wait and watch. When applications catch up with multi-threading and better load balancing across the CPU's everything will speed up again. I do can honestly say there have been huge increases in CPU technologies while core speeds have not gone up they Intel and AMD (to lessor degree currently) have made huge increases in processors and their microcode just in the last 18 months. Intel has made huge leaps in how the cache is used and how the code is passed. I think AMD will be making more advances this coming year.

While I do see the increases in GPU technology I don't think we have seen a lot in speed increases per say. I think in the last year they have caught up with software a lot but there is still more to be done in refining the technology and cleaning up the microcode as well. But there has been a lot of improvements that just don't jump out at you in benchmarks. I think it maybe another year before we really see all of the benefits there. But again if your software is not taking advantage of it you will not notice it.

 

Wow, this is incredible lol...

CPU: games aren't still supporting multiple CPUs so yeah to that date, more ghz is better for gaming. Keep in mind that a game takes like 3 years to develop and game developers are always using "older" techology. They always have to guess what will be available in the next 3 years...

Put your 3.xx P4 single core against a dual core 2.c ghx in a video encoding situation. Your single core WILL get spanked.

Memory. Agreed all we've seen was a move from DDR to DDR2; I think Intel will soon (or it has) unveil a board supporting DDR3.

HDD: Maaaaan, what about perpendicular recording? For the same speed we've seen our little 2.5" lappy drives going from a max 60-80 Gb to a whopping 250+! PLus what about SSD? Agreed it's still too pricey, but my guess is that another 12-18 months and they'll be widly available.

IMO, of course we need to level this race out. The software just can't follow the pace at which the hardware is going. That race is not more a Ghz race (the max have been topped), but it's a number of cores race. AND it will take a couple years 'til most of the software we used is optimized for multiple cores.

GPU: Nothing to say, just waiting for ATI to comeback with a nvidia killer, which it seems won't happend anytime soon lol...