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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?

#21

Post by stavros »

EvanWard97 wrote: post #7
throwitaway222 wrote: post #2

A lot more chess games online instead. Probably higher IQ as the IQ lowering social media we use would barely work.

Sounds right to me. Without being able to rely on flashy visuals and low-latency so much, games would've had to be somewhat more strategic and intellectual to sell (although I imagine graphics would eventually catch up due to its fitness for parallel processing). Even if brain rotting visual spectacles were just pushed 7 years down the line, they still would probably have a more sophisticated flavor that might be cem…

We had DOOM and Quake and Fallout 2 long before CPUs were 20x slower than today.

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

#23

Post by iKlsR »

JaumeGreen wrote: post #18

> 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…

1. Get it working

2. Get it right

3. Make it fast ... pretty

Weird observation and from personal exp a good percentage of development stops at 1 with periodic blips to 3 when issues popup (of course with an eventual rewrite coming when new people come onboard) as a consequence of not focusing on 2 due to how we build today.

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

#24

Post by eterm »

stavros wrote: post #19
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.

Not all of it was, some of it was very laggy and slow. Indeed the whole OS would frequently freeze up.

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

#25

Post by stavros »

eterm wrote: post #24
stavros wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not all of it was, some of it was very laggy and slow. Indeed the whole OS would frequently freeze up.

Sure, but nowadays all of it is laggy and slow. I cringe every time I'm faster than Slack, a text chat program.

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

#26

Post by mnw21cam »

One thing to consider is that the resolution and colour space of your computer's display also depends on available clock speed, so if you reduce that by a factor of 20, you'll also have to reduce the number of pixels in your display by the same factor. So, we'll have worse displays as well as worse compute.

As with all else - just look back to computers about 20 years ago, and that'll give you a good idea of what it'd be like. I guess the main difference is that we might have still been able to miniaturise the transistors in a chip as well as we do now, so you'd still have multi-core computers, which they didn't really do very often 20 years ago.

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

#27

Post by EvanWard97 »

farseer wrote: post #8

More C/C++ based business apps that run locally. Cloud would be less relevant. No large browser engines, which means a lot less JS and of-course no Electron :)

Good points. Somehow typing latency might actually be better, lol.

V8 might just invent like 3 more execution engines though, 1 of which uses an external TPU (open source though!) to run code JITed to HVM (Higher Order Virtual Machine) that everyone is eventually compelled to adopt, one can't be too sure JS will lose. /s

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

#28

Post by alpaca128 »

throwitaway222 wrote: post #2

A lot more chess games online instead. Probably higher IQ as the IQ lowering social media we use would barely work.

Looking at average benchmarks, current consumer CPUs are about 20x faster than in 2007-2008 [0]. That means games like Call of Duty 4 and Crysis. Likely not much more online chess than today. And in tflops the RTX 4090 is 20x faster than the GTX 970 from just 10 years ago. But it's easy to overlook that progress if you just look at the performance of the average app.

[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html

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