Comment by pathseeker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pathseeker | Hacker News Reader

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>So the improvement of Moore's law (RIP) ends up going to programmers' salaries instead of to performance improvements.

This statement doesn't really make sense. If programmers spent the time to optimize everything instead of gluing a bunch of inefficient libraries together, software would cost even more than it does now. So that's even higher salaries because there is even more business competition for the same pool of available programmer hours in the workforce (and that doesn't even take into account the fact that you would wipe out 90% of the programming workforce if writing assembly is required).

Moore's law means that you can afford inefficient code, so it's taking money from programmers and keeping it in the businesses that would have originally had to pay for a hand-tuned piece of code.

Moore's law for performance has been dead for 15 years. No one's noticed though.

There is no "Moore's law for performance". Moore's law is a statement about the number of transistors on a chip, nothing more (Moore?). And sure enough, the Threadripper machine I built this year has about double the number of transistors as the Threadripper machine I built last year, which has about double the number of transistors to the one before that... (although this is partly a function of increasing budget; Moore's law specifies a two year doubling).

But sure, if you want to talk performance - the fastest CPU this year, the Threadripper 3990X, is over 100x faster than the fastest CPU of 2005, the Athlon 64 FX-57. That's about 7-8 doublings, or pretty much spot on.

Faster how, exactly? The clock rate is ~4/3. It has 128 half-cores, but the benefits will depend on the workload. :-)

For a very long time between 1970 and 2005 doubling the transistors halved the time taken for any task. We're well past this point.

If you don't think so try and calculate a_{i+1} = rand_int() a_i mod 232 on a machine from today and one from 2005. Then do the same with a machine from 2005 and 1990.

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