>> (Bearing in mind that Pass Mark is a synthetic benchmark which 
>> measures CPU performance under idellic conditions... But even if you 
>> assume all your programs are single-threaded, divide pass marks by 4 
>> gives you 1,040 pass marks, which is still 2.17x the Pentium IV above.)
> 
> 2.55x faster for single threaded :) based on the Passmark for my 2.6ghz 
> P4.. Nice :)

Ever notice that the P4 reached almost 4 GHz... and no processor since 
has ever been that fast? ;-)

Apparently it's really hard to go any faster than that for some reason. 
So then AMD and Intel spent a while trying to make their CPUs go faster 
at the same clock speed. (IIRC, that's roughly when this 64-bit 
nonesense started happening.) And then once they'd done everything they 
could with that, they started adding more cores.

Assuming that sometimes soon people will start writing programs that 
actually utilise more than one core... (The Haskell people seriously 
believe this to be THE killer feature of Haskell. We'll see...)

I suspect the future is NUMA. Adding more cores per chip just means that 
there's even less memory bandwidth available per core... (Notice that 
GPUs are NUMA.)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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