Chris's Wiki :: blog/tech/SSDsAndCPUEconomics

The SSD boom and the theoretical multicore revolution

March 31, 2009

For quite a while now, CPU vendors have been trying to persuade people to spend a great deal of money recoding applications to run on heavily multicore CPUs so that the CPU vendors could continue to sell expensive new CPUs (to put it one way). The motivation CPU vendors offer is that if you don't make the investment, system performance can't increase any more and then the wheels come off everyone's wagon, not just theirs.

Now consider the current SSD boom. Pretty much everyone agrees that one of the best ways to improve your system right now is to replace your hard drive with an SSD; for most people, their system becomes a lot more responsive and any number of things that they do get faster in practice. There are a lot of SSDs that are going to be sold in the next few years, and they will improve a lot of systems much more significantly than most CPU upgrades do.

Replacing hard drives with SSDs is only one of quite a few practical performance improvements waiting in typical systems. A lot of PC components have basically been put on the back burner for the past while in favour of chasing ever faster CPU speeds, sometimes to absurd degrees both in theory (just look at how much faster CPUs are than memory) and in practice (even before SSDs, one of the best performance improvement many people could make was not a faster CPU but more memory). Now improvements to these other components are a fruitful source of overall system performance improvements (and thus sales) for system vendors, even if this leaves the CPU vendors in the cold.

It gets worse. The blunt unfortunate truth for CPU vendors is not just that both software firms and system manufacturers have options for selling upgrades, but that more and more people do not need more CPU power at all. It is hard to sell more CPU to someone who is already not using all of the one that they have, and knows it.

Comments on this page:

From 70.244.29.22 at 2009-04-01 01:22:52:

A year and a half ago I paid $290 for a Core 2 Quad. Since purchase exactly two workloads have brought overall CPU usage above 50%: four instances of Prime95, and emerging packages on Gentoo. The sad fact for Intel and AMD is that 95% or more of consumers have no good reason to spend more than $200 on a CPU, and that's including "games will run faster" as a good reason.

Meanwhile, DRAM prices keep dropping and hard drives lag farther and farther behind. I wonder how long it will be until people start measuring page cache miss rates on consumer-oriented machines.

Steve

From 72.253.129.84 at 2009-04-01 01:23:53:

Another nail in the coffin to the More CPU thing is the huge boom market provided by Netbooks.

Until then people kept being told they needed the latest and greatest laptop to be able to do what they needed to do, sold overblown specs and so on. Now all of a sudden the netbook comes along with it's tiny "underpowered" processor and people suddenly realise "You know what.. we don't need all that processing power for what we want to do."

Intel and AMD are suddenly left scratching their heads trying to work out how to sell to a market not interested in the latest ramping up of speed, and probably won't be frequent upgraders.

From 71.120.101.51 at 2009-04-01 02:06:01:

It is hard to sell more CPU to someone who is already not using all of the one that they have, and knows it.

And that's the key point. Those who know - laugh. But the biggest income for vendors are not those who know, but those who don't. It's them who screams "I need faster processor" when their desktop comes to a crawl because of insufficient RAM or disk-limited I/O. The first thing I did to an old bargain notebook that came with 128+128 Mb of RAM? Maxed it out another 256+256 Mb. The dinosaur went flying!

Of course, there are even worse examples. It's been more than once that I had to explain "you don't need dual-core processor for faster browsing/downloading on your home ADSL"...

Lev

Written on 31 March 2009.

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