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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

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Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#41

Post by Kadin »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #20
maccard wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each of the 40 cores on my workstation runs at 3.5 GHz. I had a quick look and I found reference to Google using pentium 2 CPUs in their data centres in 1999. According to Wikipedia, they max out at 450MHz. So my workstation is 8 times faster per core, and has 40 more cores. It's hard to justify the differences really.

20 years is equivalent to a couple of geological ages in tech, definitely not the "last few years" I was referring to. This article is from 2014 but hardly anything has changed. https://www.comsol.com/blogs/havent-cpu-clock-speeds-increas... https://superuser.com/questions/543702/why-are-newer-generat... https://i.stack.imgur.com/z94Of.png

> 20 years is equivalent to a couple of geological ages in tech

I disagree with this. I'm not going after you specifically, but I think this attitude is part of why the IT industry seems to reinvent the wheel every few years; there's this perception that we're GOING WHERE NOBODY HAS GONE BEFORE. No, most of us are not. Maybe a very few people in research labs are, or people really pushing at the raw edge of cryptography or mathematics, but the rest of us are basically cycling through the same ideas over and over, in different clothing.

I can't tell you how many times I've run into a problem and done some research, and found out that the optimal practical solution or algo was devised by some dude working at IBM in the 60s. (In fairness, some of those guys were really ahead of their time.) A person could make a very good living just strip-mining old ACM research papers from the 80s and selling the ideas in proof-of-concept form to the government, military, investors, or anyone else with no sense of history.

Sometimes I wonder how much further we'd get if we did a better job building on prior efforts and resisting the urge to clean-slate things quite so often.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#42

Post by icholy »

maltalex wrote: post #31
scarface74 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual Studio Code = real work with a complicated set of features. I expect it to consume a fair amount of memory and battery life. Slack - Shouldn’t.

What makes VSCode more “real” in your opinion?

Example https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-r...

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#43

Post by kylel »

maltalex wrote: post #31
scarface74 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual Studio Code = real work with a complicated set of features. I expect it to consume a fair amount of memory and battery life. Slack - Shouldn’t.

What makes VSCode more “real” in your opinion?

I think with Slack, the computational workload is just network I/O and rendering text and images. With VS Code, in addition to rendering text, there is code linting and compilation, which is more intensive.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#44

Post by keldaris »

bluejekyll wrote: post #34
boomlinde wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Looking at the wrong thing" is a matter of perspective. As a user, I couldn't care less that you saved money by writing a bloated web app. I care about the resources I have, which includes my own time, energy, money, computer, battery etc. In those terms, there are clear disadvantages to Electron based software.

See my response to a similar sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826915 My basic point there being that losing a small number of users due to these concerns is probably worth it. I don't want to come across as someone who's hyper-defensive of Electron. I hate the fact that such a bloated piece of software has become the standard means for supporting cross-platform development. At the same time, I…

There is no such thing and I would argue there shouldn't be. The notion that you could use a "nearly identical UI/UX" across a desktop application, a mobile application and a web page invariably leads to horrible results. The usecases are just too different. The only reason people pretend otherwise is laziness and cost cutting - a context in which Electron seems reasonable as well, to the horror of technically literate users everywhere.

What might be reasonable, at least for applications that aren't performance sensitive, is asking for a cross platform solution between desktop OSes and a different one across mobile platforms. Those exist, as you well know.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#45

Post by thedz »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

I actually feel a big difference when I upgrade, usually on the same 3-4 year cadence.

Admittedly, the most recent cycle felt somewhat the same, but generally I see a boost in quality of life. Not things like how fast a script runs on a large dataset, but like how responsive my machine is _while_ that script is running, or _while_ I'm doing some intensive task.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#46

Post by bluejekyll »

nextos wrote: post #37
bluejekyll wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke, but seriously, this is generally a goal of distributed and/or parallel computing. Reduce interdependencies, stop constant cross chatter and try to do as much computing in isolation as possible. Scrum’s not necessarily a bad anology. Here’s a different thought that this conversation has me now thinking about, what if we did think about development teams as CPU cores? We might discover weak points in the arch…

Why not just embracing simplicity? I have a golden rule for my systems. After booting into X and opening one terminal with htop and hiding kernel threads, everything should fit very comfortably in one screen. This constraint forces yourself to have a very simple setup. A few daemons, a window manager and a terminal. I do the rest of my computing in Emacs and Firefox. I have several Arch or NixOS setups that could wor…

Organizations like to grow, though. Wouldn’t that imply that organizational structure would have a maximum size?

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#47

Post by wenc »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

UI and user-facing elements are largely dependent on perception and I/O (human and computer), and the band of improvement there is narrow.

Also, I/O is often the bottleneck, which is why most people perceive a speed increase moving from spinning platters to SSDs. If you move stuff to RAM, I bet you'd see another perceptible speed increase. (I've recently started using the RAM-backed /dev/shm on Linux for transient, throwaway data generated by my programs, and boy it is fast.)

I have a Linux machine running on a Core 2 Duo machine (2005) at home and an Core i7 (2017) at work. An "ls -la" feels about the same on both. But when I try to train an ML model, the difference is stark and perceptible.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#48

Post by maxsilver »

bluejekyll wrote: post #22
JensRex wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead we get Electron, and people use it to make text editors that take up 500 MB of space.

Electron gets a lot of hate, but I think people generally are looking at the wrong thing when focusing on memory usage, ask yourself why it’s so important to so many organizations. The number one cost at most companies, is humans. Before electron what did you have for cross platform development? Java was there, but that never really took off for embedded UI inside the browser, and the browser became the primary targe…

> The number one cost at most companies, is humans. Before electron what did you have for cross platform development?

Why does development have to be cross platform?

If you are a startup with a small team, and you truly only have two or three developers, then I can understand this desire. I totally understand the "this was my side project" or "we're just four people in a garage" arguments. I get it.

But most products people complain about are from billion dollar corporations that could easily handle having totally different codebases for 4+ platforms clients, (with way more total lines, but only a little bit more complexity and cost) than one single cross-platform super-client. Humans are not expensive to these companies, and we're only talking about adding a few more.

From my own personal experience, writing a native Java Android version and a native Windows UWP C# version of the same app, the effort + maintenance of those two codebases combined was only a little bit more effort than writing one HTML+JS+Electron-ish project that spits out an Android and Windows version. Native code just isn't that difficult if you spend a little bit of time learning their APIs (I would argue it's actually simpler than modern web frontend).

I understand why companies choose Electron instead -- and I've even had to do so myself at times, I get that. It's great for small projects or low-budget projects or internal-only uses, etc.

But it's not unreasonable for people to complain a little bit when these large hyper-popular billion-dollar services (like Slack or Spotify or Twitter) cheap out a bit on their software in that way.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#49

Post by dsr_ »

ubermonkey wrote: post #38

It's tangential here, but, seriously, let me ask: For those of us here with > 15 years in the business, when's the last time you really felt a BIG uptick in performance or responsiveness from a new computer upgrade? I buy a new laptop every 3-4 years, and I buy a nice one, but generally speaking I feel like we've been kind of flat in terms of usable power for a while. 6 or 8 years ago I switched to an SSD, and THAT w…

Given:

- gigabit ethernet LAN and a speedy Internet connection

- doing "desktop" work -- browser, SSH, office docs, media consumption

All my machines feel snappy, ranging from the $250 NUC through the MBP2011 (with 16GB RAM and an SSD) through the midrange Intel desktop (also 16GB RAM and an SSD).

I don't play any significant games and major computation happens on servers, not on anything I'm typing directly on.

It's been snappy for a decade, and I don't expect a noticeable improvement the next time I get something new. I might be pushing more pixels to a screen, but it will respond at about the same speed.

Re: 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email – part two

#50

Post by pjc50 »

boomlinde wrote: post #30
bluejekyll wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron gets a lot of hate, but I think people generally are looking at the wrong thing when focusing on memory usage, ask yourself why it’s so important to so many organizations. The number one cost at most companies, is humans. Before electron what did you have for cross platform development? Java was there, but that never really took off for embedded UI inside the browser, and the browser became the primary targe…

"Looking at the wrong thing" is a matter of perspective. As a user, I couldn't care less that you saved money by writing a bloated web app. I care about the resources I have, which includes my own time, energy, money, computer, battery etc. In those terms, there are clear disadvantages to Electron based software.

The incentives are all messed up due to how we pay (or don't) for software; this is similar to how it's much easier to waste viewer's battery and bandwidth showing adverts than it is to charge them money.
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