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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

#51

Post by busterarm »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #35
busterarm wrote: post #10

Let's keep the CPU efficiency golf to Zachtronics games, please. I/O is almost always the main bottleneck. I swear to god 99% of developers out there only know how to measure cpu cycles of their code so that's the only thing they optimize for. Call me after you've seen your jobs on your k8s clusters get slow because all of your jobs are inefficiently using local disk and wasting cycles waiting in queue for reads/writ…

There's servers and there's all of the rest of consumer hardware. I need to buy a new phone every few years simply because the manufacturer refuses to update it. Or they add progressively more computationally expensive effects that makes my old hardware crawl. Or the software I use only supports 2 old version of macOS. Or Microsoft decides that your brand new cpu is no good for win 11 because it's lacking a TPM. Or g…

But Carmack is clearly talking about servers here. That is my problem -- the main audience is going to read this and think about personal compute.

All those situations you describe are also a choice made so that companies can make sales.

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

#52

Post by vrighter »

pron wrote: post #34
vrighter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the law of large numters. 5% performance hit on one system is one thing, 5% across almost all of the current computing landscape is still a pretty huge value.

But it's not free for the taking. The point is that we'd get more than that 5%'s worth in exchange. So sure, we'll get significant value "if software optimization was truly a priority", but we get even more value by making other things a priority. Saying "if we did X we'd get a lot in return" is similar to the fallacy of inverting logical implication. The question isn't, will doing something have significant value, b…

depends on whether the fact that software can be finished will ever be accepted. If you're constantly redeveloping the same thing to "optimize and streamline my experience" (please don't) then yes, the advantage is dubious. But if not, then the saved value in operating costs keeps increasing as time goes on. It won't make much difference in my homelab, but at datacenter scale it does

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

#53

Post by scotty79 »

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

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

#55

Post by victorbjorklund »

tgv wrote: post #11
AndrewDucker wrote: post #2

Well, yes. It's an economic problem (which is to say, it's a resource allocation problem). Do you have someone spend extra time optimising your software or do you have them produce more functionality. If the latter generates more cash then that's what you'll get them to do. If the former becomes important to your cashflow then you'll get them to do that.

It's the kind of economics that shifts the financial debt to accumulating waste, and technical debt, which is paid for by someone else. It's basically stealing. There are --of course-- many cases in which thorough optimizing doesn't make much sense, but the idea of just adding servers instead of rewriting is a sad state of affairs.

Not really stealing. You could off course build software that is more optimized and with the same features but at a higher cost. Would most buyers pay twice the price for a webb app that loads in 1 sec instead of 2? Probably not.

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

#56

Post by scotty79 »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #48
ngangaga wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's that deep. We are just stuck with browsers now, for better and worse. Everything else trails.

We're stuck with browsers now until the primary touch with the internet is assistants / agent UIs / chat consoles. That could end up being Electron (VS Code), though that would be a bit sad.

I don't think we are gonna go there. Talking is cumbersome. There's a reason, besides social anxiety that people prefer to use self-checkout and electronically order fastfood. There are easier ways to do a lot of things than with words.

I'd bet on maybe ad hoc ai designed ui-s you click but have a voice search when you are confused about something.

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

#57

Post by HolyLampshade »

bob1029 wrote: post #46

We've been able to run order matching engines for entire exchanges on a single thread for over a decade by this point. I think this specific class of computational power - strictly serialized transaction processing - has not grown at the same rate as other metrics would suggest. Adding 31 additional cores doesn't make the order matching engine go any faster (it could only go slower). If your product is handling fewer…

> We've been able to run order matching engines for entire exchanges on a single thread for over a decade by this point.

This is the bit that really gets me fired up. People (read: system “architects”) were so desperate to “prove their worth” and leave a mark that many of these systems have been over complicated, unleashing a litany of new issues. The original design would still satisfy 99% of use cases and these days, given local compute capacity, you could run an entire market on a single device.

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

#58

Post by pydry »

fsloth wrote: post #44
pydry wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of it was exchanged for abstractions which traded runtime speed for the ability to create apps quickly and cheaply. The market mostly didn't want 50% faster code as much as it wanted an app that didn't exist before. If I look at the apps I use on a day to day basis that are dog slow and should have been optimized (e.g. slack, jira), it's not really a lack of the industry's engineering capability to speed things…

I don’t think abundance vs speed is the right lens. No user actually wants abundance. They use few programs and would benwfit if those programs were optimized. Established apps could be optimized to the hilt. But they seldom are.

>No user actually wants abundance.

No, all users just want the few programs which they themselves need. The market is not one user, though. It's all of them.

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

#59

Post by voidUpdate »

I mean, if you put win 95 on a period appropriate machine, you can do office work easily. All that is really driving computing power is the web and gaming. If we weren't doing either of those things as much, I bet we could all quite happily use machines from the 2000s era

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

#60

Post by Gigachad »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #29
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…

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems.

The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super snappy.

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