111–120 of 225 posts
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We really need to go back to 1 supercontinent
Direct point to point conduits carrying fiber would reduce latency to a worst case of 21ms, but requires a fiber that doesn't melt at core temps (around 5200C).
Not an intuitive thing but the data is fascinating. A couple of notes of people who are confused by it: 1) The 'ns' next to the box is a graph legend not a data label (normally that would be in a box labeled legend to distinguish it from graph data) 2) The weird box and rectangle thing on the top is a slider, I didn't notice that until I was looking at the code and said "what slider?" 3) The only changes from 2005 to…
I think there are other effects too. Things like larger caches, smarter branch predictors, wider cores, etc. My 2021 processor (Apple M1 Pro) benches roughly twice as fast as my 2015 processor (Intel Core i5 2.7Ghz) in both synthetic and real-world single-core workloads.
That's not as big an improvement as we would have seen over that time period in the 90s, but it's a significant improvement none-the-less.
Mutex locking perf also is a bit suspect, since probably nobody had multi-core CPUs pre-2003, meaning mutex locks/unlocks were simple memory writes, no shared cache invalidation involved.
The only latency stats that can be meaningfully expressed in ns are the network and disk latencies.
Not an intuitive thing but the data is fascinating. A couple of notes of people who are confused by it: 1) The 'ns' next to the box is a graph legend not a data label (normally that would be in a box labeled legend to distinguish it from graph data) 2) The weird box and rectangle thing on the top is a slider, I didn't notice that until I was looking at the code and said "what slider?" 3) The only changes from 2005 to…
If anything, the takeaway is that things like memory/cache access, branch prediction failures, and mutexes have gotten more expensive. They didn't scale while the rest of the CPU sped up!
But even that isn't really true, because it doesn't tell you anything about branch prediction hit/miss rate, memory prefetching, instruction reordering, hyperthreading, etc. For a fair historic comparison you'd have to look at something like the cumulative time the execution units of a core are stalled due to waiting for something.
Honestly, the actual numbers aren't even all that relevant. It isn't really about the time individual operations take, but about the budget you have to avoid a latency penalty.
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If you look at single-threaded processor benchmarks, CPUs are still getting faster. The new i9's are 20% faster than the next-fastest chips. It's definitely not doubling every two years but it's still noticeable. https://valid.x86.fr/bench/1 Can you explain how to square that with the link saying compressing data hasn't gotten any faster since 2005?
> Can you explain how to square that with the link saying compressing data hasn't gotten any faster since 2005? Compression may be bottlenecked by ram (L2 or L3 cache) access speed, or maybe even dram (main memory) access speed.
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What item #3 tells you is that any performance gains in the last decade and a half you've experienced have been driven by multi-core, not faster processors. And that means Amdahl's Law is more important than Moore's Law these days. Uh or storage and networking? Not sure why you would leave that out, since they're the bottleneck in many programs. The slowest things are the first things you should optimize
Yeah... SSDs are so much faster than spinning disk it's not even funny. I literally refuse to run a machine that boots its main OS from spinning disk anymore. The 60 bucks to throw an SSD into it is so incredibly cheap for what you get. My wife's work gave her a (fairly basic but still fine) thinkpad - except they left the main drive as a fucking 5400rpm hdd. Then acted like assclowns when we repeatedly showed them t…
But I went a step further: the mother-in-law. She had a lower grade I3 laptop from around 2008 that took 20 minutes to boot Windows 10. It now boots in 15 seconds with a stock 512GB SSD.
I am being rewarded by both (but in very different ways).
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Sure, but that RAM isn't :) I can get a 60gb ssd for under 20 bucks (I just checked 18.99 on amazon - even I'm a little surprised at how cheap that is) That 32gb of ram is at least a crisp hundred (which also - fucking mind blowing. First time I ever added a part to a PC, it was to add 256mb of ram, and that was huge deal)
Yes, but the RAM is mostly for the gaming. It means I can easily switch between snappy desktop orrr burning a bunch on minecraft worlds and clients or whatever random game is out there. So. A lot more useful than an SSD ;) Also I'd be concerned about any SSD you can get for that price. And, frankly, you don't need that much RAM to have a pleasant desktop experience. Most of that is just for the gaming. Just a gig or…
Because, I'm also spoiled on RAM so I don't have to pick, but if I haaad to pick - I'd take a machine with 8gb of RAM and an SSD over 32gb of RAM and an HDD almost any day (actually - literally any day except when I'm running our full service stack at work, which needs about 12gb of RAM to be workable)
If I have a bunch of media - sure, throw it on a spinning 2tb drive or something. I'm not saying don't use cheap storage, I'm just saying... try the SSD. It costs about the same as coffee for the week.
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Yeah... SSDs are so much faster than spinning disk it's not even funny. I literally refuse to run a machine that boots its main OS from spinning disk anymore. The 60 bucks to throw an SSD into it is so incredibly cheap for what you get. My wife's work gave her a (fairly basic but still fine) thinkpad - except they left the main drive as a fucking 5400rpm hdd. Then acted like assclowns when we repeatedly showed them t…
That’s fine until you have to store the whole world’s cat videos on Youtube at minimal cost.
Use cheap storage for when you want cheap performance (like those pesky dancing cats :) )
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Yes, but the RAM is mostly for the gaming. It means I can easily switch between snappy desktop orrr burning a bunch on minecraft worlds and clients or whatever random game is out there. So. A lot more useful than an SSD ;) Also I'd be concerned about any SSD you can get for that price. And, frankly, you don't need that much RAM to have a pleasant desktop experience. Most of that is just for the gaming. Just a gig or…
I mean... at the risk of asking a loaded question - have you tried an ssd? Because, I'm also spoiled on RAM so I don't have to pick, but if I haaad to pick - I'd take a machine with 8gb of RAM and an SSD over 32gb of RAM and an HDD almost any day (actually - literally any day except when I'm running our full service stack at work, which needs about 12gb of RAM to be workable) If I have a bunch of media - sure, throw…
Everything is linux too, but I find it hard to believe that would matter. I mean, NTFS is a notoriously slow file system (Hedgewars, Firefox and Minecraft all had to rearchitect to handle its horrendous handling of many small files), but the reasons for it I think would not change that much with SSD.
The thing is. How would you really notice a difference after first load of an app? SSD, spinning rust, linux, everything is mem caching these days... It's really hard to tell unless you're actually memory constrained.
It's quite likely that if I had to work on an enormous number of new files, I might notice something? But my software projects aren't like that - the games and videos are, but they wouldn't fit on an SSD anyway. That's why I have an 8 terabyte hard drive.
Not an intuitive thing but the data is fascinating. A couple of notes of people who are confused by it: 1) The 'ns' next to the box is a graph legend not a data label (normally that would be in a box labeled legend to distinguish it from graph data) 2) The weird box and rectangle thing on the top is a slider, I didn't notice that until I was looking at the code and said "what slider?" 3) The only changes from 2005 to…
For example, the top right label, "Read 1,000,000 bytes sequentially from SSD" shows as 31,000ns when I load the page, but when I move the slider to the left and back to 2020, it shows a different value, 49,000ns.
This happens for about half of the values for the data labels in chrome, firefox, and safari. The initially shown values are neven shown again once the slider is moved, even when it is moved back to the starting position.