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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?

#91

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#92

Post by badsectoracula »

yitchelle wrote: post #61

The author's use case is gaming, actually retro games. While that does not benefit so significantly from faster computers, other industries would significantly benefit from computers running as fast as possible. 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. :-)

That is largely a C issue, Delphi 2 for example can compile a simple text editor application in about a second on a Pentium at ~166Mhz :-P.

Though for modern hardware there is Tiny C Compiler [0] which actually can be used as a "C scripting language" - AFAIK you can even embed it in applications for such use. Also TCCBOOT [1] was made in 2004 with TCC that compiles and boots Linux on a Pentium 4 in 15 seconds, so there is that.

[0] https://bellard.org/tcc/

[1] https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html

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

#93

Post by kristopolous »

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…

I honestly used to agree with you until I did this project.

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

#94

Post by alpaca128 »

colechristensen wrote: post #78

The 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…

> Really, I would be quite fine with, say, most websites operating on a technology level of around 1995.

I would pay for that if it was a feature.

The good news is, a lot of old software is still running fine on today's computers and lightning fast compared to modern behemoths. Too bad it's often not very compatible with other people's and organisation's workflows. And the attitudes are sometimes a bit strange because people vastly underestimate the capabilities of certain programs, especially if they run in the terminal. Yes, Vim looks weird at first. But it also doesn't need to spin up a web browser first and starts instantly on pretty much every hardware that you didn't dig out of a museum.

Although to be fair I once tinkered a bit with Electron and was surprised at how lightning fast it can be if it's not overburdened. Your comparison with gas is great - it seems optimisation is always done just enough that acceptance from the target audience doesn't suffer too much, and the rest of the performance gain is sunk somewhere in the vast network of dependencies that nobody cared to clean up.

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

#95

Post by tlocke »

I've sometimes wondered what a hypothetical super-intelligent being could program using a BBC Micro. Perhaps they could exploit the resonances of the circuits to perform analogue computation? I heard that evolutionary algorithms sometimes exploit the physical properties of circuits, and so to control for that there are two computers running the same code at different temperatures. I think they literally put one in a fridge.

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

#96

Post by badsectoracula »

The_Colonel wrote: post #87
badsectoracula wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, this is the usually the most common reason brought up. And depending on the situation, it is correct - it is the "depends on other matters" part i wrote.

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

#98

Post by badsectoracula »

kristopolous wrote: post #93
badsectoracula wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I honestly used to agree with you until I did this project.

I have a bunch of old PCs around (i like collecting them and toying around with them) and i did try to run modern stuff of them with similar results to yours, but my takeaway is always that modern stuff is just bloated without actual need to be - at least most of the time anyway.

Software doesn't have to be slow. My favorite example is Total Commander - a file manager that is still under active development for Windows which not needs almost very little memory (right now i have it open with 10 tabs -and had it open for a while- and it uses 7.3MB of memory) but even runs on something like a P133 with 16MB of RAM running Win95. It wont be that fast, but it will be perfectly usable and packs so many features (actual visible features, not stuff that theoretically might be useful but are behind 29301 layers and i may not even see them or even care about them) that i do not mind.

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

#99

Post by ajuc »

Tor3 wrote: post #64
ajuc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure 32 core 3.5 Ghz CPU wasn't available at all for PC in 2010.

I believe the point of the poster you replied to was that if you have software running at speed X it won't get particularly faster if you run the same software on a 32-core CPU. Not if the original system also ran at 3.5GHz. I.e. it doesn't get magically faster by throwing more cores at it. It could get faster by better or faster caches etc, and that's valid, but the additional cores don't magically help.

That depends on the software. Compiling C++ is basically linear with the number of cores for example.

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

#100

Post by badsectoracula »

mcv wrote: post #57

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…

About your old PC, first try to run a memcheck to ensure the RAM is fine.

Then just take it apart and clean everything, add new thermal paste, etc. I did that for my mid-2000s Athlon64 X2 (took apart everything, including removing the GPU heatsinks, etc to clean them) and it works like charm. Now i also need to find a GTX280 or equivalent GPU to fix the PC i bought after the Athlon64 X2 :-P.

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