4 ms·

Yes and the question is how many application really needs more performance than we have today? I expect Office and web browsers to work fine right now. Some sp

Yes and the question is how many application really needs more performance than we have today? I expect Office and web browsers to work fine right now. Some special things like video editing or programming might have use for much performance but most things should work. Something like 3D XPoint would be nice mostly for not having to wait for the computer to boot up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint

yvdriess 11y ago
All of them. There has been a steady march of applications gobbling up (or wasting) more cycles and memory as performance improved. I do not see how 'working fine right now' is an argument on how this march is suddenly stopping right now. Lotus-123 or WordPerfect also worked fine back then, but Office still gets bloated to the edge of usability today. As for browsers, just look at the enormous expense browser vendors go through to optimize every aspect of their software, you do not do that if you have a lot of performance headroom. What I am trying to say is that it is short sighted to say that we won't need more performance. Applications are like an expanding gas and performance is the container.
rakoo 11y ago
> Yes and the question is how many application really needs more performance than we have today? Careful with that, it's like saying "640k should be enough for everybody" or "who ever needs optical fiber ? Copper is absolutely fine". It is in fact an "unknown unknown", and we should make sure it transitions at least to the "known unknown" category. What kind of application could we do with more power, then ? I'm thinking about AI and personal assistants that Google and Facebook are trying to sell us: things that analyze the vast trove of our emails, browsing pattern, commands, habits and extract useful information for our lives. These traditionally sit in a datacenter because of the computing power needed to reliably guess what I'm looking for and giving me the right answer instantly. So, if we had more computing power available in any of our own computer, wouldn't it be better to have that assistant on our smartphone ?
acqq 11y ago
> the question is how many application really needs more performance than we have today? The similar question was asked by my otherwise extremely smart colleague around 1990 ("which plain user will ever need more than 16 MB?") But at least Gates' "640k" is apparently not true: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-systems/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-syste...

yvdriess 11y ago

All of them. There has been a steady march of applications gobbling up (or wasting) more cycles and memory as performance improved. I do not see how 'working fine right now' is an argument on how this march is suddenly stopping right now. Lotus-123 or WordPerfect also worked fine back then, but Office still gets bloated to the edge of usability today. As for browsers, just look at the enormous expense browser vendors go through to optimize every aspect of their software, you do not do that if you have a lot of performance headroom. What I am trying to say is that it is short sighted to say that we won't need more performance. Applications are like an expanding gas and performance is the container.

rakoo 11y ago

> Yes and the question is how many application really needs more performance than we have today? Careful with that, it's like saying "640k should be enough for everybody" or "who ever needs optical fiber ? Copper is absolutely fine". It is in fact an "unknown unknown", and we should make sure it transitions at least to the "known unknown" category. What kind of application could we do with more power, then ? I'm thinking about AI and personal assistants that Google and Facebook are trying to sell us: things that analyze the vast trove of our emails, browsing pattern, commands, habits and extract useful information for our lives. These traditionally sit in a datacenter because of the computing power needed to reliably guess what I'm looking for and giving me the right answer instantly. So, if we had more computing power available in any of our own computer, wouldn't it be better to have that assistant on our smartphone ?

acqq 11y ago

> the question is how many application really needs more performance than we have today? The similar question was asked by my otherwise extremely smart colleague around 1990 ("which plain user will ever need more than 16 MB?") But at least Gates' "640k" is apparently not true: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-systems/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-syste...