“ We don’t necessarily need faster, better hardware. We need more thoughtful, and more creative humans.”
Why not both? Configurable CPUs and a upgradable runtime, all this we have now.
What would happen if computers never got any faster?
71–80 of 183 posts
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#72I think the opposite conclusion is correct: Hurray, we don't have to dive into the intricacies of hardware and low-level programming anymore, but instead can focus on end-user value and making programming accessible to more people. Sure, building Electron apps is incredibly wasteful and NodeJS' type system allocates way too much memory for something that C++ would be much more frugal with, but who cares? Hardware is…
I think the issue is that rather than making C++ better we have defaulted to relying on the hardware more.
C++ is a deeply, deeply, flawed language - using something else isn't hard (and it doesn't have to be Rust). You'd be surprised at the amount of stuff you can get for free if you make it easy to express.
My D scripts are usually shorter than my Python one's (and I write code I want to save not just "it'll do"-type scripts, to my detriment), but because we don't teach people anything other than C++/Java/Python (Haskell is very nice but it's too far away to be helpful to this area of software) we falsely imprint a view that performance always cost's expressiveness or development time.
The good news is that this trend does seem to be getting better, and it's only going to get easier thanks to widespread use of infrastructure like LLVM and the social acceptance in industry of wacky languages.
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#73Programs will be rebuild and optimised many times. Fully written in low level assembly. Probably many different versions for each hardware configuration. Ultra low level hacks will be found to speed up the application. After 50 years they manage to run real-time raytracing on a 486 with some insane unexplainable tricks.
Assembly would probably increasingly only be useful to eliminate overhead rather than efficiency, because the CPUs would probably get even harder for a regular human to understand (i.e. the Compiler is probably already better at instruction scheduler than almost all of us, including me)
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#74Just 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…
I remember that my libretto 30 could play mp3s, but only with the Fraunhofer decoder - winamp took too much CPU.
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#75“ We don’t necessarily need faster, better hardware. We need more thoughtful, and more creative humans.” Why not both? Configurable CPUs and a upgradable runtime, all this we have now.
And a big point of computer is to take the need for creativity out of routine tasks.
In that apocryphal story where young Carl Friedrich Gauss's class was asked by a lazy teacher to add up all the natural numbers up to 100, Gauss came up with an ingenious and creative solution. But these days, we don't need to waste the creativity of our best and brightest like that.
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
I think I got it with an "nas" version of mpg123. I have the test audio in the home directory. You can try it out yourself 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcA8kiqd_n4
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Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#77> 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…
The performance increases from using C these days really come from it forcing you to avoid abstraction rather than access to the hardware. If you imagine the amount of indirection a Python program has just to add two numbers, that's why C is "fast". Compilers are clever, but they generally don't bother and aren't really allowed to look too far away from a given expression or function i.e. Extracting very high level i…
In principle, a higher level language like eg some variant of Haskell, would give compiler much more freedom to optimize. Including making collapsing what remains at runtime of the path between what your code describes and the missile launching.
In practice, we aren't quite there yet.
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#78The wrong take on the right idea.
Computer programs are like a gas, they’ll fill up whatever container they are put in. This is unfortunate as computers get faster the programs that run on them tend to get slower at nearly the same rate. Sure some things do grow in capability a whole lot, but much of what we do on computers is the same exchange of text with a bit of decoration that has been done for decades, and yet nothing seems the 1000x better that one would expect.
Programs, programmers, and software companies will expand until they run out of resources regardless of how much you give them. There is a real problem there, because there are things which should use negligible resources today which instead use resources akin to yesterday’s supercomputers.
Really, I would be quite fine with, say, most websites operating on a technology level of around 1995. Maybe with the improved resolution of today. With most websites I really don’t want any features developed in the last 25 years, plain old hypertext with a few graphics here and there was fine.
And yet my web browsers are using far more memory than I had disk space back then.
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#79Modern machines are stupid fast. Something like 200,000,000,000 cpu instructions per second. And we're already there. Single core CPU speed has been stagnating for years. We used to get ~1.5x performance boost every 2 years. Today's CPU's are only twice as fast as designs from a decade ago. Everything is going parallel, which buys us some time. But long term, I think the biggest factor will be "slow" programming lang…
> I dare say performance might even become government regulated, like efficiency is for home appliances
Sounds like a nightmare. But since programming has so far restricted attempts at credentialism-gatekeeping and even unionising, I'm not holding my breath.
> IMO you can already see this happening to Ruby, and Rust. Increasing attention to making low level languages more palatable.
Or viewed in reverse, attempts to make higher level languages faster.
One way to do that is to make sure that the levels of abstraction that exists in the language don't leave much of a trace at runtime. Ie compile the abstractions away.
That's more straightforward with more statically typed languages. But the excellent work done on JavaScript engines shows that given enough resources to throw at the problem, being 'slow' or 'fast' is not a property of languages but of implementations. (But the language definitely has an influence on how much implementation effort you need.)
Re: What would happen if computers never got any faster?
#80Was much of the "MegaDrive games getting better" accomplished by stuffing more chips into the cartridges?
The other replies describe the lack of coprocessors, but there is one way in which Mega Drive cartridges got more sophisticated over time - increased ROM capacity.
At launch, most games were around 512KB in size. By the end of the machine's lifespan 3MB was common and there were even some 4MB and 5MB games.