3 ms·
If stdio was 100% of all programs in the world, they'd be a 20% improvement. In reality, stdio takes more like 1% of any normal program so even 20% improvement
by gnulinux 6y ago
If stdio was 100% of all programs in the world, they'd be a 20% improvement. In reality, stdio takes more like 1% of any normal program so even 20% improvement will be barely noticeable.
- adrianN 6y agoIf stdio takes 1% of all computer time and computers take 1% of the world's electricity to run, a 20% improvement in stdio time saves many tons of CO2.
- jcranmer 6y agoBut it would still be 0.001% of the way we need to go.
- gnulinux 6y agoYou're assuming most programs run start to finish then the machine shuts down. That's probably <1% of all machines. Most machines run on a loop. So when they don't do stdio either they do some other useful computation (e.g. if a game engine is not stalled on stdio, it can process a few more frames per second) or they run an idle process which consumes less energy but very far away from 0. So, no even that logic doesn't work here. Saving 20% stdio cycles will probably not even have measurable effect on global enegy consumption.
- dgritsko 6y agoAmdahl's Law does a nice job of expressing this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
- rurban 6y agoIn many cases stdio takes like 90% overall, because it's so slow. You have to compare IO bound to CPU bound. CPU bound problems are extremely rare, but they do exist.