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

151–160 of 183 posts

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

#151

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

krageon wrote: post #133
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…

I guarantee you 99% of what is on a dev's backlog is senseless busywork that doesn't do anything important. The lack of focus on performance and efficiency has nothing to do with available resources, it is a consequence of management (political) decisions. Those decisions end up being the wrong decisions basically every time, but those are the times we live in.

> The lack of focus on performance and efficiency has nothing to do with available resources, it is a consequence of management (political) decisions.

Developers focused on building their resume or playing with the latest fadtech are at least as much to blame!

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

#152

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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.

Well, no.

When people talk of "Moore's law", they really imply that there's a huge class of problems that get solved automatically just because transistors get smaller and smaller.

This hasn't been true for a long while now. Yes, technology get better with time, but we don't get things like 32 cores in a PC just because transistors shrunk; smart people worked really hard to optimize this stuff.

TL;DR - there's no more free lunch in computing anymore.

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

#153

Post by icedchai »

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".

Maybe if you stick with Intel. My AMD "budget" laptop (Ryzen 4500U, 6 cores) blows away a much more expensive Intel laptop I bought only 2 years ago. It was less than half the price.

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

#154

Post by The_Colonel »

jcelerier wrote: post #149
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…

> in case of normal end user desktop applicaton is not reasonable in the sense that very few users will care or even notice. such a very-first-world country way of thinking. Hell, I live in france, in a fairly affluent city (Bordeaux), and my two neighbors run their stuff on 15 year old computers as buying newer computers is not really an expense they can make that easily. But they will never be able to complain to a…

Don't get me wrong. I wish I could dedicate half my time just to tweak the performance of my apps. I love them fast too and optimization is quite fun.

But there's a cost - my apps will suffer in other ways and won't be able to offer other features.

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

#156

Post by icedchai »

imtringued wrote: post #142
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…

I can have a web browser with hundreds of non trivial tabs and yet it "only" needs 2GB of RAM. Firefox used to be lean and only need 1GB but then everyone insisted on multi process browsing and it doubled the memory usage.

It's amazing what we call "lean." I used to run Netscape 2.0 on a 486 with 20 megabytes of RAM.

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

#157

Post by gumby »

pritovido wrote: post #116
weinzierl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? They are developed on faster computers but that was already the case at the heyday of these games, so the difference might be less than you would expect. What is a huge difference though is access to info…

>Back in the day I got my weekly homeopathic dose of assembly language from a local home computer magazine. I had the same experience, until I (we)found that the knowledge of those magazines were taken from books, so I(we) went to the source, the library of the University. I was a kid at the time and had friends that shared the same interests as me. The library was magical. Even today, when there is lots of amazing m…

> Even today, when there is lots of amazing materials on the web, the real deep stuff is in books.

Years ago my then 7yo was given an assignment: Find out how long woodchucks live in captivity. It was in late January in the USA so the idea is there would be many possible sources of info due to "Groundhog Day": newspapers, books, the Internet, TV... All the kids heard "blah, blah, the Internet, blah" (this was before smart phones and kids that age typically didn't use the Internet so it was exciting).

Much to his annoyance I forced my kid to come with me to the library where the librarian happily showed him how to find the answer. We made some photocopies and wrote the answer at the top. He actually brought home a book full of animal pictures.

I was in school there next day and discovered every other kid had brought a printout of the web (Wikipedia, an article about Groundhog Day, etc) but none actually had the answer to the question. Our photocopies did.

Whether my intransigence had any long term value to the kid is unclear to me.

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

#158

Post by rwmj »

moron4hire wrote: post #119
rwmj wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They really weren't. It took lots of configuration tweaks and careful selection of the right software. People could and did do the same thing with Windows back then. But trying to use a PC for general purpose work, straight out of the box, stability was a problem on all extent desktop operating systems.

I was there and this is utter nonsense. Windows crashed all the time, and Linux was rock solid with years of uptime.

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

#159

Post by ajuc »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #152
Tor3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, no. When people talk of "Moore's law", they really imply that there's a huge class of problems that get solved automatically just because transistors get smaller and smaller. This hasn't been true for a long while now. Yes, technology get better with time, but we don't get things like 32 cores in a PC just because transistors shrunk; smart people worked really hard to optimize this stuff. TL;DR - there's no mor…

> smart people worked really hard to optimize this stuff

This was always the case, it was just simpler before. Lunch was never free, it's just getting a few percent more expansive every year.

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

#160

Post by zamadatix »

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…

Things aren't increasing as fast as they were in the 90s but I'd be willing to bet at least the last 5 years of single thread stagnation was largely a fluke due to lack of competition in high end CPUs coupled with various setbacks in Intel's next generation processes preventing the (at the time) best from gaining advantage from significant manufacturing advances. I think releases like Zen 3 and Apple's M1 give a good sign the next doubling period for single thread performance may be the first that was significantly shorter than the previous.
Post reply on HN