3 ms·

I remember during the 90s, whenever I or anyone I knew got a new machine, it would be noticeably faster than previous machines. Clock speeds rocketed during the

I remember during the 90s, whenever I or anyone I knew got a new machine, it would be noticeably faster than previous machines. Clock speeds rocketed during the era, and you could actually tell just from waiting for Windows to start. Graphics cards did something similar towards the end of the decade, each time a friend got a new one it was a like a whole new world. Since any one person would still be hanging on to their machine for a few years, you could really feel the slowdown when you went back home.

Joeri 5y ago
It wasn’t just that things got faster quickly. Hardware would rapidly become too old to run modern software. My first pc was a 386 33 mhz with 8 mb ram around 1993, and by 1998 software had passed it by to the point where I literally had no use for it except hand it down as a legacy gaming computer to my younger sister. I remember being forced to use 5 year old 386 computer lab pc’s at uni in 1997 and them being too slow to do our programming assignments on. Pc’s also cost way more back then. That 386 was bottom spec and it was still 1700 euro in 2022 money. Being into computers was an expensive hobby.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  IBM-compatible PC's were expensive prior to the late-1990s, but there were plenty of lower-cost competitors in the home computer market.
api 5y ago
I call today's situation "more's law." Clock speeds and single core performance are largely stagnant but the horizontal growth is still amazing. Look at the original M1 in the MacBook Air vs. the M1 Ultra or whatever they call that 48-64 core beast. Single core is about the same. If your load is not parallelizable the M1 MacBook Air will do it about as fast as the new Mac Studio. In the x64 world they continue to squeeze more instruction level parallelism out and push the clock rates slightly higher but those come at the cost of higher power consumption. It's pretty stagnant there too unless you are willing to invest in a refrigerated liquid cooling system and overclocking capable hardware. But on multi-threaded loads the performance is still going up the way single core speeds were from 1995 until 2005. That's because a mixture of smaller process nodes, larger dies, better memory bandwidth, and better core interconnect fabrics are letting the equivalent of a whole data center be crammed into a single package. I think that is going to keep going for a while. We will probably see 256 cores on a desktop machine within 10 years and rack mount servers with 1024 cores in a single 1U case.
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  Ah, our good friend, Amdahl's law. Algorithms will need to be more than 99% parallelizable in order to gain any more performance out of that 256 core chip than a 128 core one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

Joeri 5y ago

It wasn’t just that things got faster quickly. Hardware would rapidly become too old to run modern software. My first pc was a 386 33 mhz with 8 mb ram around 1993, and by 1998 software had passed it by to the point where I literally had no use for it except hand it down as a legacy gaming computer to my younger sister. I remember being forced to use 5 year old 386 computer lab pc’s at uni in 1997 and them being too slow to do our programming assignments on. Pc’s also cost way more back then. That 386 was bottom spec and it was still 1700 euro in 2022 money. Being into computers was an expensive hobby.

zozbot234 5y ago
IBM-compatible PC's were expensive prior to the late-1990s, but there were plenty of lower-cost competitors in the home computer market.

api 5y ago

I call today's situation "more's law." Clock speeds and single core performance are largely stagnant but the horizontal growth is still amazing. Look at the original M1 in the MacBook Air vs. the M1 Ultra or whatever they call that 48-64 core beast. Single core is about the same. If your load is not parallelizable the M1 MacBook Air will do it about as fast as the new Mac Studio. In the x64 world they continue to squeeze more instruction level parallelism out and push the clock rates slightly higher but those come at the cost of higher power consumption. It's pretty stagnant there too unless you are willing to invest in a refrigerated liquid cooling system and overclocking capable hardware. But on multi-threaded loads the performance is still going up the way single core speeds were from 1995 until 2005. That's because a mixture of smaller process nodes, larger dies, better memory bandwidth, and better core interconnect fabrics are letting the equivalent of a whole data center be crammed into a single package. I think that is going to keep going for a while. We will probably see 256 cores on a desktop machine within 10 years and rack mount servers with 1024 cores in a single 1U case.

theandrewbailey 5y ago
Ah, our good friend, Amdahl's law. Algorithms will need to be more than 99% parallelizable in order to gain any more performance out of that 256 core chip than a 128 core one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law