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What Applications Will Drive System Performance?
Foredecker asks: "Companies like AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, ATI and others are continuing to drive silicon performance to new levels. Of course, every day computing (basic web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, personal finance, and the like) don't require a Intel 3.2Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading or a AMD Athlon 64 FX and their associated platforms. Of course, there are apps that will leverage today's high performance platforms. Games are an obvious category, as is video editing. I'm looking for apps that will be widely adopted and will drive volume hardware shipments. Things that come to mind are: effective, speaker independent voice recognition, accurate repeatable object recognition in digital photos and videos (or from live feeds such as web cams). What other application categories are there that will drive the need for bigger-faster-better hardware platforms?"
But I suspect people programming these things are still looking at them going "Well, if we just had a bit more power, we could do X, Y, and Z". UT2003, for example, has pretty much no interaction with anything other than a handful of objects - you can't blow up a wall, for example.
We have a long way to go before we can go for something that's virtually a complete simulation.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Anyone else notice how a system will pause when you put in a cdrom or format a floppy? This goes away when you have an SMP system. HT enabled p4's also remove this to some degree.
I'd like to see some typical performance on these types of activities, things that can "pause" a system for a couple seconds.
Loading websites with tons of thumbnails, searching hardrives with/without indexes (search pauses explorer). Programs that can Spike the CPU, use up all the buffer on a device, peg out virtual memory, freezes programs so you cant switch between them.
More multitasking benchmarks with responsiveness being goal. All benchmarks I see are geared around 1 app, how fast can you go, not how smooth can it go. This is why everyone is so interested in Linux kernel 2.4 MM patches or 2.6 low latency patches, to make the system smooth and responsive. People notice these "lags" in windows and linux.
What applications will drive the market? The same ones we have now, but written in python using bubblesort.
Well, maybe not bubblesort. But non-optimal algorithms, slow languages, and copying memory instead of passing a reference/pointer will increase.
That's not even a totally awful thing, because it means that the performance of already efficient applicatoins/languages/coders goes up as well. It also means that it's easier to start writing code without mastering TAOCP first.
So encourage your friends to write game engines in perl.
Processing power becomes very important at the two extremes of the Hertz chart :
.. ditto. Decrypting a message saying that Pearl Harbot is going to get bombed in 12 hours doesn't do us much good if it takes 14 hours to decrypt.
Things measured in units per second (ie, frames per second, transactions per second, connections per second) will always benefit by faster performance on a faster machine.
Things measured in many 10's of minutes (ie, an hour or more to process one transaction) will also benefit from a faster box. This would be cryptography, video compression codecs, and physics models.
When the transaction time is more than 1 minute but less than 10 minutes you really do not gain anything by increasing the performance of the machine (unless you can increase it to the point it runs in less than a minute. If you compile code on a computer that takes 7 minutes to compile it, buying a new computer that is twice as fast still has you compiling for 4 minutes. No real difference between the two, really, from a user's perspective.
When the transactions are measured in per second, the difference between 15fps and 30fps is the difference between unusable, and usable - particularly when we are talking about first person shooters. The difference between processing 150 visitors a second and 300 visitors a second is the difference between getting slashdotted and not.
When the transactions are measured in hours, being able to double the performance makes the difference in whether or not a particular transaction is even possible. Nightly backups are not particularly effective if they take 28 hours to process. Nightly runs of an accounting system
As long as we have applications that take more than an hour to run, and as long as we are measuring applications in X per second (frames per second in the range of 1 to 100, transactions per second of more than 1,000 and less than 50,000) - we will benefit by having faster computers.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
The bottleneck in CGI is human time, not computer time. It takes much longer to create realistic effects and CGI than it does to render them. Simplification (and therefore a reduction in CGI costs) is going to come through software improvments, some of which will take additional CPU and most of which will involve long hours of tedious programming and tons of IP locked up by the producers of high end 3D software.
Bleh!
A good example would be Palm-type devices. As big-processor speed increases, there is also an increase in small-processor speed and efficiency (limited more by heat than anything else). This has given people a smaller, more powerful Palm-type device today than they could have bought five years ago. Another example is the DVR/PVR. The new two-tuner satellite HDTV receiver/recorders can handle the receipt and recording of two high-definition streams while decoding and playing back a third - my ancient Showstopper (ReplayTV), on the other hand, starts to chug when encoding/saving an NTSC transmission (at highest quality) while watching another (I paid &700 for my 20-GB Showstopper back "in the day" while the new 250-GB HDTV units will go for $1,000 and come down from there).
It will be interesting to see how long non-PC devices take to catch up to current top PC speeds and what applications (especially portable, non-notebook apps) spring from that.
> Pornography, military, and gamers.
I wish I knew where this idea came from so I could debunk it properly. The
military I'll grant; war has always been a driving force of technology. The
other two I question. Games are driving new technology now, and have been
for thirty years or so, but historically that's a blip on the radar.
I would propose a different three things (well, two of them different): war,
communications, and entertainment. (If you like, you can group porn and games
under the umbrella of entertainment, but I believe other forms of entertainment
such as hunting and racing and even literature have been just as responsible
for driving technological development as games or porn.) Some would say space,
but that was really mostly driven by the miliary, especially at first. Some
also would say transportation, which is arguable, but I contend that usually
one form or another of communication was driving the development of newer and
better forms of transportation, at least until the last century or so. At
minimum, transportation and communication have fed off one another, as there's
little compelling reason to go somewhere if you don't have information about
that place.
Think about communications, though. Writing. Paper (both early forms such as
parchment and papyrus as well as modern paper). The printing press. Movable
type. Telegraph and phone lines. Radio. Ethernet. TCP/IP. These are the
technologies that really matter, the enabling technologies, the ones on which
everything else is based, the ones without which none of the others would have
happened.
These big three (war, communications, and entertainment) all also feed off one
another. Gunpowder was used in fireworks, later weapons. Rapid-loading guns
are only possible due to the self-contained cartridge, which is based on the
percussion cap developed for... hunting -- a sport, a kind of entertainment.
On the other hand, intercontinental communication was driven by better ships,
driven by naval needs, for the military -- war. And if you've ever seen Wag
the Dog, you'll either chuckle about the notion of entertainment driving war,
or shudder and nod, depending on your philosophical position. Either way, it
is difficult to argue that any one of these three have not been a major driving
force behind the development of technology.
Transportation, as I said, also is arguable. Gaming, in recent years, is true,
but I contend that fits under the broader category of entertainment. Maybe
I'm naive, but I can't think of any important technology that has been driven
to development by porn. Unless you want to say bandwidth, but I'd call that
communications, and anyway, I'd say that bandwidth has been driven to a larger
extent by games (entertainment) and shopping (entertainment), the military,
and, especially in the early years, plain old garden variety communications,
like email and usenet.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.