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?"

Comments

Processing speed at either end of the bell curve

[Glonoinha]

Processing power becomes very important at the two extremes of the Hertz chart :
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 .. 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.

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.

Re:Amateur filmmaking

[crisco]

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.

Consumer Application For More Power?

[Babbster]

I don't see important new applications for the desktop causing people to care about ever-increasing processor power again - outside of the examples cited in the question, of course. What I do see as being important is smaller, cheaper and more powerful devices of other stripes.

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.