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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?

#171

Post by d0mine »

gumby wrote: post #157
pritovido wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Today, it is just a single straightforward google request "how long woodchucks live in captivity" -> 14 years (shown on SRP directly) according to pbs.org groundhogs-facts (6 years in the wild)

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

#172

Post by eru »

pfdietz wrote: post #137
dsr_ wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) a…

SMT solvers are also fun for that sort of thing.

Integer linear programming solvers, too.

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

#173

Post by a9h74j »

bregma wrote: post #120

What would happen if computers never got any faster? The creativity would still go into the marketing department. We would be getting new 5G computers with Xtreme Speed® that double the performance of last year on proprietary benchmarks that no one understands but can bandy about at parties. The human genius will not be leashed by physical constraints or mathematical limits.

> 5G computers with Xtreme Speed®

Don't forget the 1nm process still using today's optics.

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

#174

Post by a9h74j »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #36

>>> Mars is the only planet in the solar system which is entirely populated by robots Yes, but, oh ... yeah :-)

Since I just came across this[1].

"The moment the robots realize that the three laws of robotics are just socially constructed norms"

[1] https://twitter.com/Thinkwert/status/1325980944654856193

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

#175

Post by a9h74j »

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. :-)

This is a use-case for D, with a compiler flag to compile-and-run.

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

#176

Post by needle0 »

Retric wrote: post #169
eggsome wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Though not many people would've had have access to a Cray X-MP back in its time, and certainly not to use it for compression in creating a hobbyist Apple II demo that's not expected to generate any profit. Again, possible in theory, but impractical in its day and age.

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

#177

Post by kristopolous »

StavrosK wrote: post #103
kristopolous wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've given it a homepage now, made it publicly accessible and am streaming it on twitch

http://bootstra386.com/~hn/

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

#178

Post by StavrosK »

kristopolous wrote: post #177
StavrosK wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've given it a homepage now, made it publicly accessible and am streaming it on twitch http://bootstra386.com/~hn/

Haha, very nice. I half-expected a stream of a camera just pointing at the box, but this is obviously better.

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

#179

Post by Retric »

needle0 wrote: post #176
Retric wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Though not many people would've had have access to a Cray X-MP back in its time, and certainly not to use it for compression in creating a hobbyist Apple II demo that's not expected to generate any profit. Again, possible in theory, but impractical in its day and age.

That’s fair, but if we assume hardware stalls for say 1,000 years you get a different ROI from computer investments. 6 hours on a 30 million dollar supercomputer that lasts for 20 years is ~1,000$ worth of it’s lifespan + electricity costs etc.

Over time you can expect various people to have made such investments and historic examples would still be valuable on “modern” hardware.

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

#180

Post by eru »

dsr_ wrote: post #123
eru wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) a…

That's sometimes fun. But I also had lots of fun solving eg the first few Project Euler challenges with some math and pen and paper. (And sometimes a desktop calculator.)

Eg https://projecteuler.net/problem=2 "By considering the terms in the Fibonacci sequence whose values do not exceed four million, find the sum of the even-valued terms." has a nice (almost) closed form solution that you only need a few integer multiplications and additions to evaluate.

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