3 ms·

There's no doubt that we're getting an ever-widening variety of clients, but this "general purpose" notion is a bit slippery. I remember when "general purpose"

by SiVal 6y ago

There's no doubt that we're getting an ever-widening variety of clients, but this "general purpose" notion is a bit slippery. I remember when "general purpose" meant that not only did computers crunch numbers for science and engineering, but they could finally handle more general business computing such as accounting and text-heavy business data processing, which was much larger than number crunching--more general purpose. Then we got microcomputers, and we added consumers and individual employees to "general purpose", and "word processing, word processing, word processing, and spreadsheets" became the new definition of general purpose computing, dwarfing big iron data processing. Then laser printers and desktop publishing, then Photoshop, CDs and "multimedia", and then The Internet (meaning the web) exploded and general purpose computing suddenly meant email, instant messaging, and so many new home pages that Yahoo could hardly list them all. In the Internet Boom, nobody defined general purpose computing as mostly word processing, much less business data processing, and forget about scientific calculating. Fast forward a couple more decades, and general purpose computing is streaming YouTube celebs, texting, binge watching streaming "TV", getting most of your news managed by Big Tech censors so you can't "misunderstand", keeping up with ever-streaming timelines of your 900 closest friends, going to work or school via Zoom, doing most of your shopping.... And where is word processing in this general purpose computing? Probably bigger than ever, but now buried in the "other" category because newer components of general purpose computing dwarf it. So if some of this is done with a laptop, and some with a "phone", and some with a flat screen in your car, and some with your TV remote, and some with an iPad...I suspect that "computers" could easily be described as either declining or growing for general purposes depending on which of many reasonable definitions you employed.

brucehoult 6y ago
You are trying to define tasks as "general purpose". They aren't and never can be. The point is that the basic modern computer design works well (enough) for almost all of those tasks. For the most part all that you need is the basic operations on 32 or 64 bit "integers": move, compare, add, subtract, and, or, xor, shift left, shift right. With this you can do spreadsheets, word processing, database, accounting, desktop publishing, web browsing, email, instant messaging, decoding MP3 audio and JPEG photos and MPEG video. And show it all on a GUI on a high resolution bitmapped display. You can increase the efficiency of some of those tasks with hardware and special purpose instructions for floating point arithmetic (though spreadsheets for example hardly benefit) and SIMD processing for media. See my other (top level) post. But you don't need them, especially if you have many general purpose CPU cores. Don't forget the original Macintosh did basically all of those tasks with just a simple integer-only CPU running at 8 MHz. No FPU, no GPU, no media instructions. A modern multi-GHz CPU can do all those tasks acceptably using only simple integer instructions as long as you don't insist on very high resolution video (and games) at high frame rates.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  >And show it all on a GUI on a high resolution bitmapped display. Minor quibble aligning with my minor quibble with the article itself: modern graphics has been depending on a dedicated graphics subprocessor for ages now. Even most Linux distros that aren't targeting extremely constrained hardware vend a graphics subsystem that assumes an accelerator card. Perhaps the graphics card can even be noted as the harbinger of the specialized-hardware trend (if one ignores the audio coprocessors before it). This trend has been riding alongside the CPU trend for ages.

by SiVal 6y ago

brucehoult 6y ago

You are trying to define tasks as "general purpose". They aren't and never can be. The point is that the basic modern computer design works well (enough) for almost all of those tasks. For the most part all that you need is the basic operations on 32 or 64 bit "integers": move, compare, add, subtract, and, or, xor, shift left, shift right. With this you can do spreadsheets, word processing, database, accounting, desktop publishing, web browsing, email, instant messaging, decoding MP3 audio and JPEG photos and MPEG video. And show it all on a GUI on a high resolution bitmapped display. You can increase the efficiency of some of those tasks with hardware and special purpose instructions for floating point arithmetic (though spreadsheets for example hardly benefit) and SIMD processing for media. See my other (top level) post. But you don't need them, especially if you have many general purpose CPU cores. Don't forget the original Macintosh did basically all of those tasks with just a simple integer-only CPU running at 8 MHz. No FPU, no GPU, no media instructions. A modern multi-GHz CPU can do all those tasks acceptably using only simple integer instructions as long as you don't insist on very high resolution video (and games) at high frame rates.

shadowgovt 6y ago
>And show it all on a GUI on a high resolution bitmapped display. Minor quibble aligning with my minor quibble with the article itself: modern graphics has been depending on a dedicated graphics subprocessor for ages now. Even most Linux distros that aren't targeting extremely constrained hardware vend a graphics subsystem that assumes an accelerator card. Perhaps the graphics card can even be noted as the harbinger of the specialized-hardware trend (if one ignores the audio coprocessors before it). This trend has been riding alongside the CPU trend for ages.