4 ms·

My professor in 1998 was saying that whatever we had then was the last technological advancement of chip production because it was not possible to make elements

by vl 4y ago

My professor in 1998 was saying that whatever we had then was the last technological advancement of chip production because it was not possible to make elements smaller due to the length of light waves, and CPUs are not going to get faster. 25 years later...

tanbog6 4y ago
To be fair, clock speeds have not really gone up in the last 20 years or so. Multi core CPUs and speedups in other bottlenecks on the other hand..
pwinnski 4y ago
Your professor was 100% correct: chips haven't been getting faster, though, and for precisely the reasons they stated. However, parallelizing work onto separate cores turned out to continue to extend performance, so it didn't matter so much. That said, I feel like there were many things that were faster 25 years ago than now, so even multicore hyper-threaded CPU improvements are being chewed up by software doing more. Still, that's a separate issue.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I had to dig out an old Pentium 4 Dell machine this weekend to work with some old hardware. 1 DIMM and a SCSI card had died in the 12 years it was powered off, but it worked just fine with 256MB of memory. Mostly as responsive as a modern machine, but you could tell when the 20 year old spinning drive had to chug a bit to load things. And I seem to still be able to navigate WinXP with no issues - no weather or ad widgets loading under my mouse cursor; it was actually a breath of fresh air. I'm not sure if that's nostalgia/familiarity or if it was really more useable. I've also heard non tech people complain about how clear it is that each Windows version is just a shabby coat of paint over the last version and they wish Microsoft would just stop, so I don't think it's just me. I have to imagine XP would fly on a current machine with multiple gigs of RAM and an SSD.
- vl 4y ago
  Not at all. In 1998 there was 0.25 um, ie 250 nm process, now we have 5 nm process. 50x improvement. In 1998 processors were ~100MHz, now we have 2-4GHz. 20x-40x improvement. Modern chips are incredibly faster even on the single core. You couldn’t get anything close to modern smartphone on 1998 technology.

by vl 4y ago

tanbog6 4y ago

To be fair, clock speeds have not really gone up in the last 20 years or so. Multi core CPUs and speedups in other bottlenecks on the other hand..

pwinnski 4y ago

Your professor was 100% correct: chips haven't been getting faster, though, and for precisely the reasons they stated. However, parallelizing work onto separate cores turned out to continue to extend performance, so it didn't matter so much. That said, I feel like there were many things that were faster 25 years ago than now, so even multicore hyper-threaded CPU improvements are being chewed up by software doing more. Still, that's a separate issue.

hotpotamus 4y ago
I had to dig out an old Pentium 4 Dell machine this weekend to work with some old hardware. 1 DIMM and a SCSI card had died in the 12 years it was powered off, but it worked just fine with 256MB of memory. Mostly as responsive as a modern machine, but you could tell when the 20 year old spinning drive had to chug a bit to load things. And I seem to still be able to navigate WinXP with no issues - no weather or ad widgets loading under my mouse cursor; it was actually a breath of fresh air. I'm not sure if that's nostalgia/familiarity or if it was really more useable. I've also heard non tech people complain about how clear it is that each Windows version is just a shabby coat of paint over the last version and they wish Microsoft would just stop, so I don't think it's just me. I have to imagine XP would fly on a current machine with multiple gigs of RAM and an SSD.
vl 4y ago
Not at all. In 1998 there was 0.25 um, ie 250 nm process, now we have 5 nm process. 50x improvement. In 1998 processors were ~100MHz, now we have 2-4GHz. 20x-40x improvement. Modern chips are incredibly faster even on the single core. You couldn’t get anything close to modern smartphone on 1998 technology.