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What would happen if computers never got any faster?

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Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#21

Post by dehrmann »

> Once you understand a system – deeply understand – it can do things that its designers never thought possible. You can push hardware beyond its apparent limits.

The interesting question is how much of a performance gain is there from hyperoptimizing for an architecture, how much from porting your code to C (or maybe assembly), and what's the cost. Considering how much more complex software has gotten than Wolfenstein 3D, the porting cost would be pretty expensive. I'm also not sure if the performance gain would be as good as hoped; compilers have gotten a lot better, architectures have gotten a lot more complex and harder to understand.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#22

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

Ace17 wrote: post #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

Yeah, the guy is living in some alternate reality. E.g., here on planet Earth low- and mid-range consumer laptops have been getting slower, not faster over the years. (Yeah, they're lighter and more power-efficient, but that's orthogonal.)

Same deal with servers: AWS and Azure are dog-slow compared to the on-premises server hardware we'd have before "the cloud".

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#23

Post by StavrosK »

kristopolous wrote: post #18

Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can see the AMD is ~200-500x faster on a given task. The P90 creeks along running the modern kernel. mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) and mpg321 fires up pulseaudio before it starts playing so that's not happening. In this who…

What kind of P90 did you find that has 128 MB of RAM? My P100 had 16... It could play (and encode!) mp3s just fine, though.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#24

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

ajuc wrote: post #13
Ace17 wrote: post #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

You can buy 32 core 3.5 GHz CPU :)

That's orthogonal. You could always scale performance by throwing money at it in the past; the issue here is the promise of "free" performance improvements just by virtue of the natural upgrade cycle.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#25

Post by mhh__ »

Ace17 wrote: post #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

(All benchmarks mentioned are from Geekbench, I don't know how methodologically sound they are).

I don't know which CPU you're actually using, but taking the i7 990x (3.5GHz, 6 cores etc. - $1k back in '11) as a reference, single threaded performance at the cutting edge has increased by roughly a factor of 2 to 3 - 7GHz enough for you?

The AMD 5950X is currently the meanest desktop chip on the market, across multithreaded workloads it's something like a factor of 6.5 faster than the i7. Sure it's got 12 more cores, but it does all that for less power at boost than the i7's nominal TDP.

Include modern memory and storage into the equation, and we've come quite a long way, and it's only going to get better now that Intel are desperate, AMD are finally back, and Apple have demonstrated ARM is good enough to displace x86.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#26

Post by [deleted] »

kristopolous wrote: post #18

Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can see the AMD is ~200-500x faster on a given task. The P90 creeks along running the modern kernel. mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) and mpg321 fires up pulseaudio before it starts playing so that's not happening. In this who…

[deleted]

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#27

Post by kristopolous »

StavrosK wrote: post #23
kristopolous wrote: post #18

Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can see the AMD is ~200-500x faster on a given task. The P90 creeks along running the modern kernel. mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) and mpg321 fires up pulseaudio before it starts playing so that's not happening. In this who…

What kind of P90 did you find that has 128 MB of RAM? My P100 had 16... It could play (and encode!) mp3s just fine, though.

it was a server class machine. It's a Micron tower. I'm using 4 32MB 72 pin EDO modules. I can get a model number if you really want.

It also has a PATA card to support the larger disk (I'm using 20GB) and has a PCI USB card to support well, basically anything (it's kinda fun using a wireless keyboard on it).

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#28

Post by bobthepanda »

dehrmann wrote: post #21

> Once you understand a system – deeply understand – it can do things that its designers never thought possible. You can push hardware beyond its apparent limits. The interesting question is how much of a performance gain is there from hyperoptimizing for an architecture, how much from porting your code to C (or maybe assembly), and what's the cost. Considering how much more complex software has gotten than Wolfenste…

I mean, this is still done (not to as absurdly a degree as in the past) with consoles, which for the most part have a few permutations per generation at most.

The big thing that would cause a trend away from this would be the demand to target cross-platform. I wouldn't call Windows software particularly optimized, and it wouldn't make sense to do these optimizations for Windows, because there are countless permutations of hardware that can run Windows 10 off the shelf, so optimizing for all of those would be a Sisyphean task. Combine that with the fact that even console games these days are generally targeting cross-platform on multiple consoles and PC, and this type of optimization is largely out of the realm of the possible.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#29

Post by StavrosK »

kristopolous wrote: post #27
StavrosK wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of P90 did you find that has 128 MB of RAM? My P100 had 16... It could play (and encode!) mp3s just fine, though.

it was a server class machine. It's a Micron tower. I'm using 4 32MB 72 pin EDO modules. I can get a model number if you really want. It also has a PATA card to support the larger disk (I'm using 20GB) and has a PCI USB card to support well, basically anything (it's kinda fun using a wireless keyboard on it).

Oooh, beefy.

Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

#30

Post by bobthepanda »

avian wrote: post #12

> Once you understand a system – deeply understand – it can do things that its designers never thought possible. I often wonder to what degree that is possible in modern computers. Their complexity so hugely beyond that of old 8-bit micros that I doubt a single person could completely understand it. I mean to the level it’s possible to understand a BBC micro - what every CPU cycle does, what function every gate in th…

Even if you could there are endless permutations of CPU, GPU, and whatnot that you couldn't possibly optimize for all of them. Coupled with the fact that an obvious way to boost profits of a game is to design it to be easily portable across some combination of PC and various consoles, and why would you hyper-optimize a game for hardware?

We're in a vastly different world than BBC Micro or the Sega Genesis, where a game targeting multiple platforms is now pretty normal, and if it's not it's usually for business reasons rather than hardware incompatibility. And ports in those days were often from-the-ground rewrites, which I would probably hazard is not true today of most of them.

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