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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?

#81

Post by coldtea »

needle0 wrote: post #33

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…

>Many amazing pieces of code involve pre-rendering or other various forms of precomputation that are extremely computationally expensive but the final result will run on a low-powered machine.

Well, if by "many" you mean "mostly games", yes. Not true for other kinds of software...

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

#82

Post by badsectoracula »

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…

That your P90 is slow to run modern software is largely because modern software is bloated. You mention:

> 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.

But a P90 could not only play wav files (in fact my 386 with 4MB of RAM could play and edit wav files in realtime just fine under Windows 3.1) but also both decode and play mp3 files at the background while doing other tasks in Windows 95.

That mpv and mplayer are not able to do that shows that they require way more resources than is really necessary to perform the task at hand.

> People aren't being foolish or irresponsible or naive in not caring about these things, they're being sensible. Running a Pentium 90 with modern software --- that's the actual unreasonable hobby here.

That is a false dichotomy, running modern software on a P90 might not be very reasonable but that doesn't make people who do not care about the resource usage of their applications sensible - if they are or not depends on other matters.

And being unable or hard to run modern software on a P90 is because of the state of current software, but that doesn't mean software has to be like that because it is "modern" - someone explicitly made a choice to develop the software in a way that causes it to be like that.

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

#83

Post by imhoguy »

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…

> * telnet bootstra386.com:1994

> * ssh bootstra386.com:1995

Ha! These port numbers made my day:)

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

#85

Post by eivarv »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #70
yitchelle wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

3.6GHz from 10 years ago and 3.6GHz from today aren't the same though. Modern processors have way more specialized hardware for common tasks that weren't common a decade ago. 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 hardwar…

M1 isn't RISC-V, but a custom ARM.

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

#86

Post by badsectoracula »

wolframhempel wrote: post #60

I 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…

The biggest issue with this sort of thinking is that developers tend to create applications that either assume they're the only applications running in the system - or they use machines so powerful that when you try their applications on a lower end machine (PCs with just 4GB of RAM and weak CPUs are still being sold for example) they might as well assumed they'd be the only applications running in the system.

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

#87

Post by The_Colonel »

badsectoracula wrote: post #82
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…

That your P90 is slow to run modern software is largely because modern software is bloated. You mention: > 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. But a P90 could not only play wav files (in fact my 386 with 4MB of RAM could play and edit wav files in realtime just fine under Windows 3.1) but also both deco…

> That is a false dichotomy, running modern software on a P90 might not be very reasonable but that doesn't make people who do not care about the resource usage of their applications sensible - if they are or not depends on other matters.

Developer work is expensive and there's always a backlog of fixes and features. Spending non trivial time on lowering memory consumption from 40 to 28 MB in case of normal end user desktop applicaton is not reasonable in the sense that very few users will care or even notice. This time could be spend developing features with actual user impact.

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

#88

Post by tester34 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #22
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".

>Yeah, the guy is living in some alternate reality.

How so?

(I'm talking from desktop perspective)

I'm following tech news and it feels like there's always news about AMD releasing new stuff or Intel trying to catch up

I bought my 8 cores CPU for +-125$ of _my_currency_ year ago which was unbelievable like 3? years ago. Meanwhile I'm still far behind of what's on the edge.

Also nowadays I can spend like 60$ of _my_currency to get insanely fast NVMe M2 disks, so things are cheap nowadays I guess.

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

#89

Post by visarga »

> 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.

That was until 2010, now we've hit the wall with pure single threaded speed and parallel programming is much harder to scale.

When you get a faster CPU your software doesn't need to change, but when you want it to run on more cores or machines it becomes a nuanced discussion depending on the algorithm, memory access pattern and networking.

We've come full circle and now we need to focus on the software again, to further improve performance.

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

#90

Post by tester34 »

throwaway189262 wrote: post #32

Modern 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 think the biggest factor will be "slow" programming languages going extinct.

then make this language faster, problem solved :)

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