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Earlier quoted context omitted.
You pretty much summed up the major misconception of how CPUs work (and get faster) these days. It's not about cores or clocking speed.
Can you elaborate on how CPUs work then? I'm curious what matters if clock speed and core count doesn't.
That said, I would also dispute that increasing core count doesn't matter. That does seem to be the main way to get more computing power.
"We’re so spoiled today. Every week a newer, faster processor is released. Hardware gets cheaper and we can just throw more chips at the problem." I've been running a 3.5GHz CPU (with 4 HT cores) for nearly 10 years. That's a lot of weeks. Surely, today, I should be able to buy a 10GHz CPU, right? :D
I think the author is misguided by saying "we need more thoughtful, and more creative humans". It's as if the author is lamenting some lost productivity that we would have otherwise achieved as a society by now. Just like how human work naturally fills up the time allotted to it [1], programmers tend to use up the hardware resources to make their apps usable. If time was spent hyperoptimizing, it would not change the…
Computers have gotten so unoptimized for people that a machine from the 80s has better capabilities for the average office worker than one used today. The only reason why we don't use WordPerfect 3.0 is because Microsoft has managed to force planned obsolescence on software and hardware for 30 years for no reason other than they can.
> We don’t necessarily need faster, better hardware. We need more thoughtful, and more creative humans. Money line, but I strenuously disagree. We need both, but thankfully, we have that. Games like Breath of the Wild, Death Stranding, and Kingdom Hearts III; and services like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Stadia and Steam wouldn't exist without both. You would have games, you would have services, but you wouldn't have th…
I can't speak to the services side of your comment, but my professional experience is in games. I worked as part of a team that once backported a game from the Xbox 360 to the PlayStation 2 (512 to 24 megabytes of RAM, much slower CPU, much more limited 'shaders' if you can call VU code 'shaders', etc). The PS2 had 32 megabytes of RAM, but by Sony submission requirements you weren't allowed to touch the bottom 8mb of…
Breath of the Wild would not be Breath of the Wild as we know it without the subtle details, more objects in memory, more intelligent AI, graphical details, increased draw distance, made possible by the beefier hardware. The Switch isn't exactly the beefiest hardware to begin with, but there is a noticeable improvement in the gameplay compared to even just the Wii U version.
My favorite game of all time is Chrono Trigger, released in 1995 on the SNES, but part of what made Chrono Trigger special was that many of the game scenarios were hand tuned, down to the placement of enemies on screen and the ways they interacted with you. It is a fun and immersive game, and I still play it every now and then, but you can see the limitations of the original hardware in the game and how much more the all-star crew (seriously, think the Dream Team but for JRPGs, never to be replicated again) could have done with the game with just one generation more of improvements in the hardware.
"We’re so spoiled today. Every week a newer, faster processor is released. Hardware gets cheaper and we can just throw more chips at the problem." I've been running a 3.5GHz CPU (with 4 HT cores) for nearly 10 years. That's a lot of weeks. Surely, today, I should be able to buy a 10GHz CPU, right? :D
Yeah, the guy is living in some alternate reality. E.g., here on planet Earth low- and mid-range consumer laptops have been getting slower , not faster over the years. (Yeah, they're lighter and more power-efficient, but that's orthogonal.) Same deal with servers: AWS and Azure are dog-slow compared to the on-premises server hardware we'd have before "the cloud".
Just recently I got a Pentium 90 up and running using modern software (NetBSD 9.0). Doing a side by side speed comparison against my 3970x threadripper you can see the AMD is ~200-500x faster on a given task. The P90 creeks along running the modern kernel. mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) and mpg321 fires up pulseaudio before it starts playing so that's not happening. In this who…
> mpv and mplayer can't play anything smoothly (not even as a .wav file) If you mean command line tools, this is a bit surprising (assuming no pulse audio). >As machines have progressed, the great wins of the past have become nearly unmeasurable noise. I bet they are measurable when you get the cloud bill...
Currently that old PC has become unstable and occasionally crashes or reboots. No idea why. I'd love to get it working again, but it feels a bit pointless for such an old PC. But it feels wasteful to just chuck it out; there are tons of things it can still do. Maybe if I just upgrade the CPU?
So do we really need games to continue to demand more and more from the hardware, or should games be made to do more with less? There are excellent games that run fine on lesser hardware.
Arguably the best game of the past decades in Minecraft, and it runs fine on my son's crappy school laptop without GPU (though not at very high framerate, and not when he wants to stream). (I'd really like that laptop to last him for ages, but it turns out he needs Blender for school, and rendering Blender movies requires more GPU.)
I think the author is misguided by saying "we need more thoughtful, and more creative humans". It's as if the author is lamenting some lost productivity that we would have otherwise achieved as a society by now. Just like how human work naturally fills up the time allotted to it [1], programmers tend to use up the hardware resources to make their apps usable. If time was spent hyperoptimizing, it would not change the…
We've seen the same mind-shift happen for storage: remember the pre-gmail days when Microsoft/Yahoo/Your internal IT department gave you 2MB of email storage, and you had to optimize your mail archive to fit this constraint? Do we really want humans that are better at optimizing mail archives? Of course not, we want mail storage we don't have to think about. And the same is true for computation.