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Simple use case of doing a compile to generate a binary. Imagine if that process was only a few milliseconds, C language could be reclassified as an interpreted language. :-)
Related achievement: The original Atari 2600 Pac Man was notoriously bad. Someone made a much better version in 2014. http://retrogamingmagazine.com/2015/09/07/pac-man-on-atari-2... https://atariage.com/forums/topic/229152-new-pacman-for-atar...
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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.
I'm pretty sure 32 core 3.5 Ghz CPU wasn't available at all for PC in 2010.
Lately I've been feeling like computers have become fast enough . During the 1990s, the pace of improvement was staggering, and the impact of every hardware improvement was really felt. But these days, I've come to expect a 10-year life from my hardware. My previous PC, now 12 year old, worked admirably for 10 years. It ran The Witcher 2 just fine. It did everything just fine, except for the latest games; after some…
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…
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…
> mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) If you mean command line tools, this is a bit surprising (assuming no pulse audio). >As machines have progressed, the great wins of the past have become nearly unmeasurable noise. I bet they are measurable when you get the cloud bill...
Here's a youtube livestream of the machine. The monitor is hooked up and running X under the hn user account along with a set of speakers. You can feel free to run things with the DISPLAY=:0 environment set.
Have fun.
The final products of those amazing programs that show up late in the platform's lifetime are indeed running on the same hardware, but aren't those programs often developed using faster computers of later periods? For instance, Donkey Kong Country does run on an unmodified SNES purchased on its launch day, but its creation shouldn't have been possible were it not for the Silicon Graphics workstations used to create t…
Still, those demos couldn't have been created on an unexpanded C64 without the help of modern cross-development: running an assembler natively takes up memory that can now be freed for data and code. The same goes for some of the audio and graphics: using a PC to downsample from a higher resolution yields better quality and those resolutions wouldn't fit on a floppy, let alone the unexpanded memory.
Some of it could maybe be done natively with a RAMLink and hard drive, but not all of it.
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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".
I think that this is wrong perspective. The computers that you and I are using right now on our desks does not get slower. A CPU running 3.6GHz will still be running at 3.6GHz in a few years time. The moving target is software.
Yes, the compute cores are going at the same speed. But you aren't getting the significant advantage of other hardware optimizations.
Just look at the M1 benchmarks for goodness sake. (A bit unfair because it's RISC-V based, but even x86 hardware has improved enormously in the last decade.)