3 ms·
On the other hand, computer hardware has also gotten drastically cheaper. How much did one of those Burroughs B5000 systems cost? Tens of thousands of dollars?
by silentbicycle 18y ago
On the other hand, computer hardware has also gotten drastically cheaper. How much did one of those Burroughs B5000 systems cost? Tens of thousands of dollars? (Hundreds?) I expect that spending that much on modern hardware and clustering it together would come quite a bit closer to what Moore's law would suggest.
Not everything can just be made parallel at the drop of a hat, of course, and the architecture itself is probably partially to blame for the difference, but there are also other major differences.
- Hexstream 18y agoThe point is that if modern computers had been based on that architecture, which was way, way more efficient for execution of high-level languages, today we'd have perhaps the same speed in GHZ but we could do way more because the high-level languages wouldn't need to execute at a level so far removed from machine language. Worrying about how much those machines costed at the time is like worrying about how much a GB of ram costed at the time.
- silentbicycle 18y agoI agree with your underlying point, I just think that it's a little deceptive to compare a modern, $750 computer's processor to a $100,000+ mainframe's without acknowledging that they were also designed with a very different budget. I was wondering about how much the processor itself influences things a few days ago while reading an interview with Charles Moore in which he described Forth-native processors, but I've done very little with any assembly languages directly, so it's kind of beyond my ken. (Most of what I know about different architectures has to do with porting C programs.)