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What would happen if computers never got any faster?

shkspr.mobi

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

#101

Post by AntiImperialist »

rubatuga wrote: post #34

I think the author is misguided by saying "we need more thoughtful, and more creative humans". It's as if the author is lamenting some lost productivity that we would have otherwise achieved as a society by now. Just like how human work naturally fills up the time allotted to it [1], programmers tend to use up the hardware resources to make their apps usable. If time was spent hyperoptimizing, it would not change the…

The author seems to think that not spending time optimizing for slower hardware when the hardware keeps getting faster is somehow not thoughtful or creative.

We're thoughtfully and creatively optimizing for the world that exists now (i.e. one where hardware keeps getting faster). When hardware stops getting any faster, we'll thoughtfully and creatively optimize for that then.

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

#102

Post by samoa42 »

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…

might be an interesting comparison with a netbsd release from the era

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

#103

Post by StavrosK »

kristopolous wrote: post #50
StavrosK wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oooh, beefy.

I use it as a deskstand so its rather inaccessible without 10 minutes of work but here's photo I found http://getpostdelete.com/PXL_20201126_073138155.jpg

Oh man, the memories. Mine looks similar, drab gray box and all.

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

#104

Post by wnkrshm »

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.

I might be wrong but that should also depend on the bitrate of the mp3 - ofc with the high bitrates of today's audio, the older cpu night struggle.

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

#106

Post by StavrosK »

wnkrshm wrote: post #104
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.

I might be wrong but that should also depend on the bitrate of the mp3 - ofc with the high bitrates of today's audio, the older cpu night struggle.

I don't think so, it was fine with any bitrate. It was around 120% of real-time, but it'd get the job done at any bitrate (perhaps more slowly).

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

#107

Post by rwmj »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #66
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…

The interesting thing is that in their day we used those devices to do real work. The main thing that sticks in my mind wasn't the slowness but the lack of stability. Rebooting/reinstalling to fix issues was very common.

They were rock solid running Linux. I remember we had a 486 where the jiffies counter overflowed (which is what happened on 386/486-era Linux after ~ 497 days). We expected it would crash then, but the machine kept running just fine.

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

#108

Post by scottlocklin »

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…

>even x86 hardware has improved enormously in the last decade.

No, it really hasn't! My ancient x220 is still as fast as, or faster than almost all pre 2020 laptops. By contrast, hardware in the period of time ~9 years before 2011 when I bought it is absurdly slower to the point of unusability. Same story with my threadripper versus my 2009 era desktop. For single threaded stuff, not IO bound, they're subjectively about the same. If I need a lot of threads, big memory or big IO, the recent machine is comically faster (like 100-1000x), but lots of things are single thread bound. Again if I take the leap back in time separating the threadripper from my 2009 era machine; there were huge improvements in performance; imagine trying to compile something on a 1998 era tower like OP did.

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

#109

Post by jbergens »

badsectoracula wrote: post #86
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.

Oh, I remember old versions of SQL Server, they took ALL the memory on the machine. Did not work well if you tried to run something else at the same time.

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

#110

Post by mbirth »

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…

> 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 hides a big problem of today’s software. Instead of having time to actually think about their software and optimise it, it’s all about throughput and making the economists happy. That’s why projects use various ready-to-use frameworks and get bloated very quickly. And time to look at the whole monstrosity and think about how you can slim it down “is not reasonable” as nobody pays for that. Users are supposed to get a better computer instead.

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