5 ms·
Computers today are slower than they have ever been. And tomorrow's computers are going to be even slower. In many applications, the amount of data grows at le
by jltsiren 2y ago
Computers today are slower than they have ever been. And tomorrow's computers are going to be even slower.
In many applications, the amount of data grows at least as quickly as computer performance. If the time complexity of an algorithm is superlinear, today's computer needs more time to run it with today's data than yesterday's computer did with yesterday's data. Algorithms that used to be practical get more and more expensive to run, until they eventually become impractical.
The more data you have, the more you have to think about algorithms. Brute-forcing can be expensive in terms of compute costs and wall-clock time, while low-level optimizations can take a lot of developer time.
- nyolfen 2y agoif we're talking about relative human-experienced performance, the slowest computers i ever owned were in the early-mid 00s. they sped up as multicore and ssd's entered the picture and plateaued about ten years ago ime.
- WillAdams 2y agoThe most striking performance observation of my experience was that Apple took a system, OpenStep 4.2 which ran okay on a 33 MHz 68040 (and acceptably on my 25MHz Cube) and made it run only a little bit better on a 400MHz G3 as the Mac OS X Public Beta. The difference of course was anti-aliasing, and much greater bit depth, and running multiple programming environments/toolkits (Carbon and Java).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]