Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

10% faster is a pretty nice improvement, especially in 2020.

Here's a little Wikipedia stub about Profile-Guided Optimization, for those who'd like to read more about the technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profile-guided_optimization

View on HN

10% is impressive. Albeit a web browser isn't quite the same situation but shaving even a percent off a program could save millions for a company like Google.

I do not doubt you, but for my own education could you elaborate a little on how Google or any othr company could save millions.

If you had a backend workload that draws 20MW and you make it 10% faster, you saved a million dollars per year in electricity alone.

Math may vary depending on cost of electricity.

but the executable that is built with these optimizations is running on people's computers, not as a backend on google servers.. or am I missing something?

Perhaps I didn't understand the question. I thought the question was about why anyone would save a lot of money from software going "only" 10% faster. Most large datacenter operators will get unreasonably excited about even 1%. But you're probably right that Google itself will not directly benefit from making Chrome faster on macOS.

Every cpu cycle costs energy, turning into heat which the ac needs to remove. One computer is nothing but across all their computers it adds up.

I can imagine scraping companies are probably putting serious workloads on headless chromium instances. But that's really the only thing I can imagine

Interesting to see this 10% number for a browser. I worked on AAA games and that is the number we saw as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com