What would happen if computers never got any faster? • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by qubex » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

ausbah wrote: post #122

mbirth wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The constant ratchet on users to provide ever-increasing amounts of computing resources is a textbook case of an ‘externality’ for the developers so we get the whole usual Tragedy Of The Commons situation yada yada yada.

Applying this to the original question one gets that if performance ceases to increase users can no longer be expected to endlessly ramp up their specs so suddenly optimisation and slimming-down will be in vogue.

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

#162

Post by eggsome » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 10:00 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #139

wiz21c wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, special use case : data compression. Many compression that work on old computer are actually the decompression side of an asymmetric compression scheme. Asymmetric meaning that it requires a lot more CPU power than a mere C64 can provide to compress data whereas the same C64 can easily decompress... I've coded myself a Bad Apple video demo for the Apple 2+. Takes minutes of compression on my I7 but can be decrun…

If computers stop getting faster then larger investments in software development become reasonable. As we are not limited to a single i7 today, the C64 was hardly the most powerful machine of that time. A Cray X-MP released just after the C64 might take hours to run that same compression, which would have been expensive but hardly impossible.

A Cray X-MP could only do 800 flops. Even a first gen i7 is many orders of magnitude better than that.

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

#163

Post by ilaksh » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

The weird thing that some people don't realize here is that it is kind of already like that. The CPU speed increases every year or two went from orders of magnitude to maybe a hundred percent if you are lucky.

The biggest increase recently has been in cores. But still most games for example are heavily dependent on fast individual cores.

We are definitely seeing more emphasis on new techniques in AI and graphics and general computing that are more parallel. But also we have not come close to optimizing what can be done with the existing speed.

Of course, the computers have been getting faster steadily, just not as rapidly as the previous era.

We have not come close to what is possible with the new abundance of cores or the new AI-specifix hardware.

And 3D circuits have barely gotten started.

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

#164

Post by scott-smith_us » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 11:14 PM UTC

> "Mars is the only planet in the solar system which is entirely populated by robots from Planet Earth."

I guess this is really saying that there are no active probes on the surface of any of the other (inner/rocky) planets.

This strikes me as a very roundabout way of saying this; as though the population of the other planets (besides Earth) included humans or alien robots...

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

#165

Post by timbit42 » Sat, Nov 28, 2020, 12:54 AM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #143

visarga wrote: post #89

> 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 discussi…

AMD's CPUs and Apple's SoCs keep getting faster.

The individual cores aren't getting much faster. They are adding more cores, which allows them to say the processor is faster, but more cores means the memory is more of a bottleneck and single core tasks won't be much faster.

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

#166

Post by colechristensen » Sat, Nov 28, 2020, 2:38 AM UTC

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.

Moby Dick is about 1MB.

2000x for any number of tabs for mostly text data is still quite ridiculous.

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

#167

Post by bitwize » Sat, Nov 28, 2020, 6:48 AM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #151

krageon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The bottom line is, if you don't play with the latest fadtech you end up sidelined into a niche, career-wise. God help you if your niche ever goes away; even if it doesn't, embedded C++ developers make about half of what Node.js webshit developers make, despite the job requiring more in the way of specialized skills.

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

#168

Post by tonyedgecombe » Sat, Nov 28, 2020, 10:25 AM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #158

moron4hire wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to distinguish between Windows NT and 95/98/Me. I was installing a lot of servers back then and NT was way ahead of Linux in nearly every way.

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

#169

Post by Retric » Sat, Nov 28, 2020, 12:09 PM UTC

eggsome wrote: post #162

Retric wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If computers stop getting faster then larger investments in software development become reasonable. As we are not limited to a single i7 today, the C64 was hardly the most powerful machine of that time. A Cray X-MP released just after the C64 might take hours to run that same compression, which would have been expensive but hardly impossible.

A Cray X-MP could only do 800 flops. Even a first gen i7 is many orders of magnitude better than that.

That’s 800 Megaflops not flops.

First an i7 920 is up to 54,000 megaflops vs a cray X-MP at 800 MFlops X minutes on a first gen i7 is ~1.1 hours in terms of pure flops. However, that i7’s architecture has many compromises that tend to make it significantly less efficient.

Newer i7’s have significantly more power, but it’s still few minutes > Y hours not days or anything.

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

#170

Post by rasz » Sat, Nov 28, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

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.

Are they really open tho? or hibernated? Keeping hundreds of active open tabs was something Opera up to 12.x could do (every additional tab instance took something like 2-10MB by itself + ram for assets). FF/Chrome simply run out of memory very quickly.