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"Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU" Because software is constrained by t

"Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU" Because software is constrained by the lack of performance improvement. If someone managed to double single threaded performance every 18 months for the next 5 years, I can assure you that it would force an upgrade cycle. If for no other reason than than FF/chrome/websites would bloat up enough that people would have to upgrade. Its not like people sat around for hours waiting for their 286's to boot, or to print word processing documents. Faster technology enables "features" which suddenly people cannot live without which drives the upgrade cycle. There are plenty of technologies which are not yet "mature" and could benefit from more single threaded computing power. Speech recognition, compression, and on and on, are algorithms which are tuned for available computing power rather than the best compression ratio, or the most accurate recognition.

agumonkey 12y ago
Agreed, but few things: 1) I firmly believe we've reached a plateau, I'm having a hard time imagining what new complex feature people would need that much. That's anecdotal and subjective but even amazing things like computer vision or speech recognition ended up in the gimmick side of things to me. The web is becoming bloated for no reason, old websites had more content, less chrome. Fast web is easy, no javascript, text. ps: bloated websites are enabled by more capacity. 2) Speed is not everything, there's a sweet spot between instantaneous and unusable. Most people aiming for speed are after user conversion, in the fear that response time would lower their numbers. For real usage, speed is not a real factor as long as its predictable and meaningful. I have soft machines with jaggy and unreliable behavior which annoy me more than my old 350MHz machine. 3) Hardware constraints are good. Without limitation nobody would have cared about space or time efficient algorithms (jpeg, mp3, or even zip). See how late Microsoft has been trying to improve storage use of its OS. All in all it goes both ways. I'm really open to ideas, but I'm failing to see what I'm doing now that I couldn't do under win2k days (except for HD video, 3D). I used to render cgi animation, compose multitrack, abuse photoshop...

agumonkey 12y ago

Agreed, but few things: 1) I firmly believe we've reached a plateau, I'm having a hard time imagining what new complex feature people would need that much. That's anecdotal and subjective but even amazing things like computer vision or speech recognition ended up in the gimmick side of things to me. The web is becoming bloated for no reason, old websites had more content, less chrome. Fast web is easy, no javascript, text. ps: bloated websites are enabled by more capacity. 2) Speed is not everything, there's a sweet spot between instantaneous and unusable. Most people aiming for speed are after user conversion, in the fear that response time would lower their numbers. For real usage, speed is not a real factor as long as its predictable and meaningful. I have soft machines with jaggy and unreliable behavior which annoy me more than my old 350MHz machine. 3) Hardware constraints are good. Without limitation nobody would have cared about space or time efficient algorithms (jpeg, mp3, or even zip). See how late Microsoft has been trying to improve storage use of its OS. All in all it goes both ways. I'm really open to ideas, but I'm failing to see what I'm doing now that I couldn't do under win2k days (except for HD video, 3D). I used to render cgi animation, compose multitrack, abuse photoshop...