Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Sigh. There is a huge elephant in this room, it was the beast of Christmas past. Specifically, for years Microsoft colluded with Intel to make systems which consumed more memory and CPU power such that an 'upgrade' cycle would be required.

Have you ever wondered how a machine which is less than 1/100th the speed of the machine on your desk computed the bills, interest, and statements for millions of credit card users. The IBM 370 that computed and printed those statements for MasterCard back in the late 70's had a whole lot of I/O channels.

I would love to see it get relevant again that one consider that the computer they were targeting would be roughly the same speed and that all of their 'features' had to be implemented with no loss of speed of the overall system. There is a lot of room for optimization, nobody has seriously attacked that problem yet, no one has needed to because people who optimized were left in the dust by people who could assume the next generation of machines would be fast enough to make bloated code good enough.

We haven't done anything though about Amdahl's law, and of course the thing that gives us parallelism is an interconnect between compute nexii (nexuses?). I was hoping there would be some insights along those lines in the article but I was disappointed.

These days, the collusion is between Intel/ARM and Mozilla / Google Chrome.

I've got a closet full of ancient hardware (well, a vast underground chamber, but we'll stick to PC hardware of the past decade or two), most of which should still run a Linux kernel and, with a threshhold of somewhere between 16 an 96 MB, bootstrap a Debian installation. For basic command-line utilities, they're fine, and even a few graphical programs.

But truth is that your computer is doing much, much more, at least in terms of system demands, than it did 10 or 20 years ago. This doesn't translate to prodigious amounts of end-user productivity necessarily, but it does suck cycles and RAM (and on handhelds: battery life). Which reminds me that a lot of the interesting stuff in terms of efficiency is happening in the mobile space. Form factors, weight, and battery size and weight are all highly constrained, so efficiency gains in both hardware and software are critically important.

Back to that desktop/laptop increasing complexity: I see this as having a fractal nature -- as hardware capabilities increase, there are multiple dimensions of increasing demand complexity, very much as you'd render a fractal and, for a huge increase in the amount of computation, see only a slight refinement of the pattern.

Systems of yesteryear did what they did by keeping the tasks simple, and extraneous processing to an absolute minimum. Ask anyone who's waited an afternoon for a few precious seconds of CPU on a highly overtasked mainframe what their opinion of that experience is. These days, to a fair approximation, throwing more hardware at a problem isn't a bad first approximation -- it's cheaper than programmer time, and, well, if it doesn't work, hardware is fungible (especially in the cloud): time for plan B, work smarter.

Specifically, for years Microsoft colluded with Intel to make systems which consumed more memory and CPU power such that an 'upgrade' cycle would be required.

It does not seem right. Recent Ubuntu releases will not perform better on older machines than Windows 7, and I seriously doubt that there's a pact between Canonical and Intel as well.

It's really just a generalization of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

"Work expands so as to fill the time [or other resources] available for its completion."

I think this is a large part of it. When you look at something like Compiz and you say "well that is nice and cool and all but its not really contributing to the work being done." Its eye candy that can be done because we have a GPU sitting there otherwise idle.

There is a story, probably apocryphal at this point, that a long time ago in what seems like a different universe, an engineer working on the Xerox Star system, was looking into why it was bogging down. It was reported there were nearly 800 subroutine calls between a key stroke and a letter was rendered on the screen. They managed to cut that number in half and the performance improved by a third. Mostly it was abstractions,

People always find uses for every available CPU cycle, as predicted, now we're entering a time when you will need to optimize something to get more cycles.

Windows Vista was a large jump in resource usage. At the time Microsoft was building it, it was expected that Intel would bring the Netburst architecture to at least 4 GHz in the near future. They didn't, and the next release of Windows is not so careless on resources. Coincidence?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com