Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Around 1980 my family got their first computer. I've followed this business ever since, and I was amazed that a CRAY could do MFLOPS. My MS basic interpreter could do hundreds or even thousands of FLOPs on its 8080A. I watched as the high end went to hundreds of MFLOPS, then GIGAFLOPS which seemed insane. There were national efforts to reach TFLOPS, and reading about the challenges (IIRC at the time interconnect was a huge deal) made it seem like the end was near. Moore's law was always in danger. Then came PETAFLOPS consuming megawatts of power.

And now I play VR on a battery powered gizmo doing about 1 TFLOP strapped to my head, and EXAFLOPS are basically here. This is all with at least TSMC 5nm, 3nm, 2nm, and multi-layer left on the table. After watching this relentless advance for 4 decades I'm pretty sure it will go beyond even that, but we just don't know what it will look like yet.

It's become everyday tech to me, but if I look back the progression is absolutely astounding.

> After watching this relentless advance for 4 decades I'm pretty sure it will go beyond even that, but we just don't know what it will look like yet.

Just like people in the 1950s, having seen the rise of the car and the airplane in their lifetimes, thought we would have flying cars by the 2000s.

Things will eventually plateau, and we will see improvements elsewhere.

It is astounding. What is more astounding to me is that we burn so many of these cycles on eye candy, and that we waste so many of them on bloat. If not for that your battery powered gizmo would run for many days on one charge instead of having to be connected to its umbilical for 8 hours every night.

If that’s astounding think about what most of us spend our time doing with the insane amount of processing power available between our ears.

Sure, but we didn't engineer that with performance in mind, and with computers it was enough to declare a previous generation obsolete. Whereas productivity for computer based applications was actually pretty good for the first generation of those machines, pretty much every cycle counted. Some people used them to play games and there was a recreational element to programming in its own right but it wasn't as though anybody would burn cycles to give a UI the texture of the real thing, it was a computer that worked and it produced results, which was all that mattered.

most of that processing power is unfortunately special purpose and can't be easily repurposed for something else. We have very good vision processing, but it is not like you can entirely high-jack that for something else.

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