Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What would happen if computers never got any faster?

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 183 posts

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

#121

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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

Modern processors have not just increased in core count, but also in how efficient their pipelining, parallelizing, and instruction reordering is. We used to measure CPUs by cycles/instruction, but modern CPUs have inverted that relationship and now we can execute several instructions per cycle, so each cycle is actually doing more even if we can't squeeze more cycles in per second.

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

#122

Post by ausbah »

mbirth wrote: post #110
The_Colonel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

economists happy? I'd argue it's just normal business incentives

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

#123

Post by dsr_ »

eru wrote: post #75
amiga1200 wrote: post #71

“ 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.

My father was working on a math puzzle, and he asked me if I had any insight into it. I said that it would take me days or weeks of remembering/relearning to have any hope of solving it cleverly -- but the search space for the answers was only factorial(10) possibilities, so I could write a program to brute force it.

I did. 30 minutes of code writing (of which about 20 was spent making sure I didn't miss something) and then less than 3 seconds of computing time later, I had the answer for him. Nothing clever at all -- just trying all the possibilities and seeing if that set fit.

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

#124

Post by sleepysysadmin »

If you bought a Core I7-990x in 2011 you got 6 cores at 3.47ghz. l3 cache of 12mb.

If you bought an average cpu last year it was 6 cores at 3.5ghz. l3 cache of 12mb.

The latest chips might have a couple more cores but also tend to be less frequency; or the 6 core is 4.1ghz. Instruction sets havent even changed much. The only thing that really made things faster got killed by Spectre. We really havent increased in speed over the last decade.

So what happened? Nothing, nobody noticed.

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

#125

Post by MaxBarraclough »

mhh__ wrote: post #72
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…

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"-ty…

On a similar note: we rarely make use of abstractions that 'compile away', instead using abstractions that bring a runtime performance cost.

An example of this is declarative GUI design. It's a good design idea to use a declarative language for this, as it helps with GUI design tooling (drag-and-drop editors), and eliminates the bugs that could arise from doing the work 'by hand' in a programming language. Most solutions end up parsing XML (or something similar) at runtime, rather than compiling down to an optimised binary. It's possible to 'have it all', in this instance.

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

#126

Post by tsss »

falcrist wrote: post #45
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…

Well there are a couple responses to that. First of all, just because computers stopped advancing doesn't mean all computers will be the same. You'll still be able to use big, powerful machines as workstations where you write and deploy software for smaller machines. At the same time the N64 came out, there were MUCH more powerful machines you could use. Secondly, there's really nothing in principle that would stop y…

Certain static analysis is out of the question for sure. You absolutely need a more powerful computer for that, or rather you need more memory.

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

#127

Post by needle0 »

falcrist wrote: post #45
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…

Well there are a couple responses to that. First of all, just because computers stopped advancing doesn't mean all computers will be the same. You'll still be able to use big, powerful machines as workstations where you write and deploy software for smaller machines. At the same time the N64 came out, there were MUCH more powerful machines you could use. Secondly, there's really nothing in principle that would stop y…

That's true in principle, but beyond a certain degree it would leave the realm of practicality, eg. You can pre-render something complex in 3D or do some complex calculations to populate a precomputed table on any computer no matter how slow, and it might be clunky and inconvenient yet still possible if it's merely 2x or 3x slow. But if it's something like 10000x slow doing it would pretty much be out of the question, as real-world projects (even hobbyist ones) are bound by limitations of time and budget.

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

#128

Post by tluyben2 »

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…

You have more luck seeing how this works on systems that are not x86 / did not make it out of the 70/80/90s but that were popular then. The fact that this [0] runs on a 3.6mhz processor with 128kb memory shows what can be done when you chisel away at software that has to run on hardware that will not improve.

[0] http://www.symbos.de/

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

#129

Post by sys_64738 »

OSs and apps would get more efficient as they are forced to live within the constraints of the hardware. With hardware outpacing software it has only lead to bloat filling in the gaps where performance isn’t an issue as it’s ‘fast’ enough. If you enforce constraints in space and time then we’d return to knowledge of the hardware being primary consideration. Things like Java and python would need to get efficient or eventually die.

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

#130

Post by magicalhippo »

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.

For me the Pentium was where it started to shift. My 468 got booted several times a day, not just from stability but having to mess with IRQ settings and whatnot for my ISA soundcard etc.

When I installed Windows 2000 on my Pentium 150 box it was pretty much rock solid. Proper memory protection and PCI made life so much better.

Post reply on HN