Spectre puts the brakes on CPU need for speed
0Spectre puts the brakes on CPU need for speed.
Hallelujah! If any good is to come from the revelations of Meltdown and Spectre, it will be acknowledging that performance increases in silicon were made on a foundation of sand, and the security tide has come in.
Goodbye ridiculous comparisons made for spurious reasons in order to make new silicon that isn't much faster than last year's silicon appear much better.
Case in point, from twelve months ago when Intel expanded its Kaby Lake family:
For its H-series core chips, Intel is touting a 20 percent "productivity improvement", but that comparison is against a 2013 22-nanometre i7-4700HQ running at a base frequency of 2.4GHz and using 8GB of DDR3 memory compared to the 14nm i7-7700HQ running at 2.8GHz and packing 16GB of DDR4 memory.