On the other hand, at the time we would have expected twenty years of progress to make the cores a thousand times faster. Instead that number is more like 5x.
On a different hand the way things were scaling 20 years ago (1ghz took 35 watts) we'd have 5,000W processors - instead we have 196 for 300 watts. If these are anything like ThreadRipper I wonder if they can unlock to 1000W with liquid cooling. On the flip side we are rolling about 1 to 2 watts per core which is wild. Also, can't some of these do 512bit math instructions instead of just 32bit?
Well, a 286 was about 3 watts right? So if our medium point is 35 watts then the final would be 400 watts.
Or if our medium point is a 60 watt pentium 4 then our final point would be a 1200 watt single core with multiple millions of times the performance, and dropping down to 300 watts would still be crazy fast.
