What would happen if computers never got any faster?
1–10 of 183 posts
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#2Was much of the "MegaDrive games getting better" accomplished by stuffing more chips into the cartridges?
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#3This reads like cope for the fact that machines from other vendors will now lag behind Macs for quite a while to come.
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#4Was much of the "MegaDrive games getting better" accomplished by stuffing more chips into the cartridges?
Stuffing more chips onto game cartridges was a thing that happened with the SNES quite a bit, but really only happened with Virtua Racing on the Genesis/Mega Drive. If you look at early titles for a particular platform vs the later ones, the later ones almost always look/perform better because the developers learned how to milk more resources out of the platform. An example from the Playstation 1 era is Naughty Dog Studios, as seen here in this old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9737156
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#5Was much of the "MegaDrive games getting better" accomplished by stuffing more chips into the cartridges?
Not very much. The SNES was the king of stuffing coprocessor chips onto cartridges; the hardware was a minor 6502 upgrade paired with amazing sound from Sony, and some pretty good video hardware. Sega did almost the opposite: they took the 68000, a pretty good CPU for the time, and paired it with OK sound and a tweak to the TI VDP they were using in the Master System. The average SNES game just needed the extra oomph that a coprocessor could give, while the average Genesis game probably was fine with the 68K.
That's not to say coprocessors didn't exist. Sega loved expanding the Genesis - but with hardware-addons that didn't sell very well. The Sega CD is effectively a second console's worth of coprocessors. It included much-improved audio hardware (which barely got used because you had CDDA), another 68000 CPU, and some fancy rotozoom ASIC stuff. There is a SNES style "just sneak a chip onto the cartridge" thing, though, but there's only one game that does that: Virtua Racing. It has a very primitive hardware rasterizer on board, which actually causes problems with some later-model Genesis consoles. It also won't work at all if you have a 32X plugged in.
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#6Was much of the "MegaDrive games getting better" accomplished by stuffing more chips into the cartridges?
Not very much. The SNES was the king of stuffing coprocessor chips onto cartridges; the hardware was a minor 6502 upgrade paired with amazing sound from Sony, and some pretty good video hardware. Sega did almost the opposite: they took the 68000, a pretty good CPU for the time, and paired it with OK sound and a tweak to the TI VDP they were using in the Master System. The average SNES game just needed the extra oomph…
it's far from settled that the 68k in the Genesis was more powerful than the 65816 in the SNES. Most instructions on the 68816 use 1/3 of the cycles per instruction compared to the 68k. Sega had their marketing of "blast processing" because Sonic was a "fast game" we all know what was pure marketing. Similarly fast games, meaning games that displayed the same features as Sonic, came out on SNES, Uniracers would be one such example.
I think it would be pretty hard to find a Genesis game that would unequivocally demonstrate the 68k in the Genesis was a win over the 65816 in the SNES.
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#7Given that Featurecreep/Software complexity continues to increase, there would be a shift in mindset to leverage more Performant languages/tools instead of only focussing on highlevel productivity for developers. Read: use Rust instead of Ruby. Or augment, like native libs in python
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#8"We’re so spoiled today. Every week a newer, faster processor is released. Hardware gets cheaper and we can just throw more chips at the problem."
I've been running a 3.5GHz CPU (with 4 HT cores) for nearly 10 years.
That's a lot of weeks. Surely, today, I should be able to buy a 10GHz CPU, right? :D
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#9This reads like cope for the fact that machines from other vendors will now lag behind Macs for quite a while to come.
Perhaps this will usher in more competition which will benefit consumers and developers with even more powerful hardware! Apple has certainly raised the bar significantly with their M1 chip.
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#10Another fun question to ask is what if you were working at a FAANG company and they never bought any more computers?