3 ms·
> Computers have gotten a lot faster, even if the clock speed is not that much faster We're not stagnating but the same code I thought was too slow in 1998 was
by gopalv 2y ago
> Computers have gotten a lot faster, even if the clock speed is not that much faster
We're not stagnating but the same code I thought was too slow in 1998 was good enough in 2008, which is probably not true for code I would've thrown away in 2015.
The only place where that has happened in the last decade is for IOPS - old IOPS heavy code which would have been rewritten with group-commit tricks is probably slower than a naive implementation that fsync'd all the time. A 2015 first cut of IO code probably beats the spinning disk optimized version from the same year on modern hardware.
The clock-speed comment is totally on the money though - a lot of the clocks were spent waiting for memory latencies and those have improved significantly across the years particularly if you use an Apple Silicon style memory which is physically closer in a light cone from the DIMMs of the past.
- Legend2440 2y agoA lot of clocks are still spent waiting for memory. GPUs in particular are limited by memory bandwidth despite a memory bus that runs at terabytes per second. Back when I started programming, it was reasonable to precompute lookup tables for multiplications and trig functions. Now you'd never do that - it's far cheaper to recompute it than to look it up from memory.
- rbanffy 2y agoIndeed. When I was in college I designed a stack-based CPU. It was a perfectly sane design decision to keep the stack in main memory. It made the design VERY simple (but I kept a couple registers in the architecture, just in case). These days it'd be an unbelievably stupid decision.