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How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#11

Post by EvanWard97 »

ggm wrote: post #6

We'd still be using triple-DES to protect data, arguing that the NIST time to break it was still far out beyond. And hash functions would be like the CRC32 in TCP, not the modern stuff. CISC computers which did more in parallel per instruction would be common because they existed for concrete reasons: the settling time for things in a discrete logic system was high, you needed to try and do as much as possible inside…

20x more compute isn't much in terms of cryptographic security concerns, no? Ah but triple-DES was recently depreciated.

Definitely sounds right that we'd get an earlier, heavier emphasis on parallelism and hardware acceleration. I'm guessing the slower speed of causality also applies to propagation delay and memory latencies, so there wouldn't be new motivation for particular architectural decisions beyond "God please make this fast enough for our real-time control systems or human interaction needs".

If we got deep learning years or decades earlier, that also seems scary for AI existential risk, as we are just barely starting to figure out how the big inscrutable matrices work, and that's with the benefit of more time people have had to sound the alarm bells and attract talent and funding for AI interpretability research.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#12

Post by moshegramovsky »

I write C++ for high-performance Windows desktop applications that are used on a wide variety of form factors. This means that I still optimize a lot of things, such as what happens when a user edits a property in an edit box. How can that edit be minimized? How do I make sure that commands operate in less than a second? How can we hide latency when a long execution time can't be avoided? 99% of the time, optimizations are about doing less, not doing something faster or with lower-level code. You'll never write faster code than code that doesn't run.

I think the GPU would do a lot more work in most applications than it does today. If a process needs to be super fast, when applicable, I write a compute shader. I've written ridiculous compute shaders that do ridiculous things. They are stupidly fast. One time I reduced something from a 15 minute execution time to running hundreds of times per second. And I didn't even do that good of a job with the shader code.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#15

Post by iKlsR »

moshegramovsky wrote: post #12

I write C++ for high-performance Windows desktop applications that are used on a wide variety of form factors. This means that I still optimize a lot of things, such as what happens when a user edits a property in an edit box. How can that edit be minimized? How do I make sure that commands operate in less than a second? How can we hide latency when a long execution time can't be avoided? 99% of the time, optimizatio…

Tangential but funny story from some years ago, did the same on a virtual reality app (Qt, Oculus SDK) so talking multi-threaded renderer, tons of background activity, even spawned a mini helper server to process tasks and such and did custom hacking (registry, window flags) to override windows features to make the app snappy. Distinctly remember spending weeks on startup time to get the app to consistently drop the user into a session between 250 - 500ms even from cold launch which involved something like a mini page file to capture state and other things only for my boss at the time to come and say the app was "too fast", users couldn't see the splash screen so we added a random(1.f, 3.f) second sleep...

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#16

Post by tgma »

ggm wrote: post #6

We'd still be using triple-DES to protect data, arguing that the NIST time to break it was still far out beyond. And hash functions would be like the CRC32 in TCP, not the modern stuff. CISC computers which did more in parallel per instruction would be common because they existed for concrete reasons: the settling time for things in a discrete logic system was high, you needed to try and do as much as possible inside…

Fun fact: 3DES is slower than modern standards, namely AES.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#17

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

I'd probably be out of a job because we wouldn't be doing this crap in software.

You wouldn't have people wasting cpu cycles on pointless animation. You'd have people thinking about how long it takes to follow a pointer. You'd have people seriously thinking about whether the Specter and Meltdown and subsequent bugs really need to be worked around when it costs you 50% of the meager performance you still have.

I might ask if everything else is 20x times slower too. GPU speeds, memory bandwidth, network bandwidth.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#18

Post by JaumeGreen »

> Might the overall greater pressure for performance have kept us writing lower-level code with more bugs while shipping less features?

Are you living in the same world as the rest of us? Nowadays programs are shipped with plenty of bugs, mostly because patching them afterwards is "cheap". In the old days that wasn't as cheap.

So having lower powered computers would have made us write programs with less features, but also less bugs. Formal coding would be up, and instead of moving fast and break things most serious business would be writing coq or idris tests for their programs.

Bootcamps also wouldn't be a thing, unless they were at least a couple of years long. We'd need people knowing about complexity, big O, defensive programming, and plenty of other things.

And plenty of things we take for granted would be far away. Starting with LLMs and maybe even most forms of autocomplete and automatic tooling.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#19

Post by stavros »

eterm wrote: post #13

I'm not sure I understand the premise, because CPU speeds were 20x slower. Just go back a decade or two. They weren't some halcyon days of bug-free software back then, quite the opposite.

Software wasn't bug-free, but it was responsive.

Re: How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?

#20

Post by r0ckarong »

HN answer:

To stick with your analogy: There would be more optimization and the rate of releasing stuff would be slower because it would have to be tested. That's it. Remember catrdige based console games? How many patches or day one updated did you have to install there? How many times would they crash or soft-lock themselves? People tested more and optimized more because there were constraints.

Today we have plenty of resources and thus you can be wasteful. Managers trade speed over waste. If you can make it work unoptimized, ship a 150 GB installer and 80 GB day1 patch do it NOW. Money today, not when you're done making it "better" for the user.

Sci-Fi answer: We wouldn't be playing the same type of games. Why would we have to rely on something like our representation of graphics? If the cognition would be 20x faster and more powerful we probably wouldn't need abstractions but would have found a way to dump data into the cognition stream more directly.

I think the idea that 20x faster cognition would just mean "could watch a movie at 480fps" is too limited. More like you could play 24 movies per second and still understand what's going on.

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