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The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

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Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#671

Post by ninalanyon »

CelestialMystic wrote: post #651
mint2 wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efficiency related regulation like the energy star is THE reason why companies started caring. Same with low flush toilets. I vaguely remember the initial ones had issues, but tbh less than the older use a ton of water toilets my family had before that were also super clog prone. Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time a low flush toilet clogged. Massive water saving that took regulation. Efficiency regulations…

I literally had a new toilet put in a couple of years ago. It clogs pretty easily. So you just end up flushing it more, so you don't actually save any water. BTW the same thing happened with vacuum cleaners, you need to hover more to get the same amount of dust out because they capped the power in the EU. My old Vacuum Cleaner I managed to find, literally sticks to the carpet when hoovering.

My Philips Silentio vacuum cleaner is both quiet and powerful and is also within the EU limits on input power. It will stick to the floor if I turn up the power too high.

And the Norwegian made and designed low flow toilets in my house flush perfectly every time. Have the flush volumes reduced further in the last fifteen years?

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#672

Post by Turskarama »

immibis wrote: post #642
rapsey wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market capitalism does not exist anywhere.

In fact, free market and capitalism are opposites.

Lol no they aren't, they're orthogonal, almost entirely unrelated.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#673

Post by freddie_mercury »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #18
freddie_mercury wrote: post #7

The world DOES run on older hardware. How new do you think the CPU in your bank ATM or car's ECU is?

Some of it does. The chips in everyones pockets do a lot of compute and are relatively new though.

I'd be willing to bet that even a brand new iPhone has a surprising number of reasonably old pieces of hardware for Bluetooth, wifi, gyroscope, accelerometer, etc. Not everything in your phone changes as fast as the CPU.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#675

Post by melissabaerz60 »

caseyy wrote: post #91

There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…

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Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#677

Post by voidspark »

scotty79 wrote: post #53
titzer wrote: post #12

I like to point out that since ~1980, computing power has increased about 1000X. If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that), and we turned it on everywhere, we could have computers that are just a mere 950X faster. If you went back in time to 1980 and offered the following choice: I'll give you a computer that runs 950X faster and doesn't have a huge class of memory safety vulnerabi…

Since 1980 maybe. But since 2005 it increased maybe 5x and even that's generous. And that's half of the time that passed and two decades. https://youtu.be/m7PVZixO35c?si=px2QKP9-80hDV8Ui

As the other guy said, top of the line CPUs today are roughly ~100x faster than 20 years ago. A single core is ~10x faster (in terms of instructions per second) and we have ~10x the number of cores.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#678

Post by voidspark »

jayd16 wrote: post #274
ngangaga wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course". Interesting conclusion—I'd argue we haven't seen much innovation since the smartphone (18 years ago now), and it's entirely because capital is relying on the advances of hardware to sell what is to consumers essentially the same product that they already have. Of course, I can't read anything past the first tweet.

We have self driving cars, amazing advancement in computer graphics, dead reckoning of camera position from visual input... In the meantime, hardware has had to go wide on threads as single core performance has not improved. You could argue that's been a software gain and a hardware failure.

Single core performance has improved about 10x in 20 years

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#679

Post by Thedarkb »

astrange wrote: post #634
yifanl wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nintendo Switch on a chipset that was outdated a decade ago can run Tears of the Kingdom. It's not sensible that modern hardware is anything less than instant.

That's because TOTK is designed to run on it, with careful compromises and a lot of manual tuning. Nintendo comes up with a working game first and then adds the story - BotW/TotK are post-apocalyptic so they don't have to show you too many people on screen at once. The other way you can tell this is that both games have the same story even though one is a sequel! Like Ganon takes over the castle/Hyrule and then Link…

The framing device for The Legend of Zelda games is that it's a mythological cycle in which Link, Ganon, and Zelda are periodically reborn and the plot begins anew with new characters. It lets them be flexible with the setting, side quests, and characters as the series progresses and it's been selling games for just shy of forty years.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#680

Post by voidspark »

cogman10 wrote: post #282
jayd16 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have self driving cars, amazing advancement in computer graphics, dead reckoning of camera position from visual input... In the meantime, hardware has had to go wide on threads as single core performance has not improved. You could argue that's been a software gain and a hardware failure.

> single core performance has not improved. Single core performance has improved, but at a much slower rate than I experienced as a kid. Over the last 10 years, we are something like 120% improvement in single core performance. And, not for nothing, efficiency has become much more important. More CPU performance hasn't been a major driving factor vs having a laptop that runs for 12 hours. It's simply easier to add a…

300% single core performance from Haswell (2015) to today.
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