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from the all-good-thigns-must-come-to-an-end dept.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
After more than 50 years of miniaturization, the transistor could stop shrinking in just five years. That is the prediction of the 2015 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which was officially released earlier this month.
After 2021, the report forecasts, it will no longer be economically desirable for companies to continue to shrink the dimensions of transistors in microprocessors. Instead, chip manufacturers will turn to other means of boosting density, namely turning the transistor from a horizontal to a vertical geometry and building multiple layers of circuitry, one on top of another.
For some, this change will likely be interpreted as another death knell for Moore's Law, the repeated doubling of transistor densities that has given us the extraordinarily capable computers we have today. Compounding the drama is the fact that this is the last ITRS roadmap, the end to a more-than-20-year-old coordinated planning effort that began in the United States and was then expanded to include the rest of the world.
[...]
This final ITRS report is titled ITRS 2.0. The name reflects the idea that improvements in computing are no longer driven from the bottom-up, by tinier switches and denser or faster memories. Instead, it takes a more top-down approach, focusing on the applications that now drive chip design, such as data centers, the Internet of Things, and mobile gadgets.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday July 26 2016, @10:30AM
Now how many threads do your apps run?
On my iToy, I don't have a process monitor to measure them, but most of them use libdispatch and UIKit is designed to allow multiple threads to independently update different views (which includes querying model objects and so on). On OS X, the only single-threaded processes that I have are running in a terminal. Most of the daemons use 2 threads, and most of the GUI applications use 30+.
A better question is how CPU-bound are your apps. With the CPU in this laptop (3,000 threads currently alive) sitting at 96% idle, the benefit from most of that threading is low-latency response to events, not CPU throughput.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday July 27 2016, @12:28AM
I don't think you need to pay the Apple Tax anymore to run code you wrote yourself on your own iYouHaveBeenAssimilated.
Instruments is quite a good GUI performance monitor. It can monitor all manner of counters, produce pretty graphs, do stack trees and so on. It uses a kernel facility that I think is called "dtrace". On OS X it is possible in principal to implement your own counters, but I understand it's somewhat difficult.
Apple's performance tools have just about always been of stellar quality. The reason so much iOS and OS X code sucks so hard is because us coders are all a bunch of ignorant slackers.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]