4 ms·
Point of fact: computers aren't really getting faster anymore. Well, phones and tablets still are, but desktops and servers? Not so much.
by moomin 13y ago
Point of fact: computers aren't really getting faster anymore. Well, phones and tablets still are, but desktops and servers? Not so much.
- quchen 13y agoSingle CPUs don't, but the number of cores does grow. GPUs are also worth considering here. What does not get faster is programs written for old architectures. 20 years ago the best way to optimize a program was waiting a decade. That won't work today, and to make programs future-proof they have to scale to a lot of threads.
- rubiquity 13y agos/threads/cores/g
- gngeal 13y agoWhat makes you think they aren't getting faster?
- VLM 13y agoSoftware is slowing down faster than hardware is speeding up. My work desktop takes somewhat over 5 minutes to boot; at 3.4 GHz and 4 cores, 5 minutes equates to almost exactly four trillion operations, which accomplish nothing at all WRT productivity. Of course most of the time is spend waiting for IO rather than actually calculating anything. Years ago, four trillion instructions processed would have accomplished something powerful, something business critical. Now all it means is you've booted up. The end user doesn't care about a waveform inside a box, all they know is computers are slower and less productive than ever.
- gngeal 13y agoSoftware is slowing down faster than hardware is speeding up. Write your own; that's the only way of staying sane. (It's especially atrocious with vertical market applications, of course. Not only does the SW I used to use in the past suck more and more, but it doesn't even keep adding the features I really need.)