Summarizing CPU and GPU Design Trends with Product Data

TL;DR

This paper analyzes over 4000 CPU and GPU products to evaluate the validity of Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling, highlighting the importance of architectural innovations and performance trends in the semiconductor industry.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of CPU and GPU product data, assessing the impact of physical scaling limits and architectural solutions on performance trends.

Findings

Transistor scaling remains vital for Moore's Law validity.

GPU performance surpasses CPU performance due to frequency and design improvements.

The performance gap between GPUs and CPUs is narrowing due to new CPU features.

Abstract

Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling have guided the semiconductor industry for the past few decades. Recently, both laws have faced validity challenges as transistor sizes approach the practical limits of physics. We are interested in testing the validity of these laws and reflect on the reasons responsible. In this work, we collect data of more than 4000 publicly-available CPU and GPU products. We find that transistor scaling remains critical in keeping the laws valid. However, architectural solutions have become increasingly important and will play a larger role in the future. We observe that GPUs consistently deliver higher performance than CPUs. GPU performance continues to rise because of increases in GPU frequency, improvements in the thermal design power (TDP), and growth in die size. But we also see the ratio of GPU to CPU performance moving closer to parity, thanks to new SIMD extensions on CPUs and increased CPU core counts.