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Where Have All The Cycles Gone?
Mai writes "Computers are getting faster all the time, or so they tell us. But, in fact, the user experience of performance hasn't improved much over the past 15 years. This article takes a look at where all the precious processor time and memory are going."
Computers are getting faster all the time, or so they tell us. But, in fact, the user experience of performance hasn't improved much over the past 15 years. Peter looks at where all the processor time and memory are going.
Ummmmm..... No.
A number of years ago, I had a project that required three days for each calculation. Just for kicks, when I got my dual G5, I ran the same calculation with the same parameters and it was complete almost instantaneously. Yes, yes....I know..memory bound performance versus disk swapping of memory space, but at the time, the memory on that system was maxed out (128 MB for $5000).
I also know that one of the games I helped work through beta (Halo) would absolutely not run on much hardware older than a few years ago.
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That would be the number one way to waste cycles on any low end system nowadays. I swear, I've seen P4's with Intel graphics run slower than PIII's with even a mediocre card in it.
Nobody except embedded programmers. My biggest project of late runs on an 8-bit, 8 MHz CPU with about 7k of Flash and 192 BYTES of RAM. Not megs, not kilobytes, but bytes. That's equivalent to less than three lines worth of text. And the code's written in C, rather than assembly, so while it's easier to maintain, it takes more effort to make sure it stays efficient.
I think all programming students should have to code for a system like this. It gives you a MUCH greater appreciation for what the compiler is doing for you, and what the consequences of simple changes can be.
I started out on a 8088 processor 11-12 years ago. Now I am using a dual proc G5 at work, which is so fast I can no longer blame the computer for my coffee breaks. It takes a good bit of video rendering to keep it busy long enough for me to get a coffee refill.
This has been a Public Service Announcement. Not to be confused with anything useful.
Now I could barely fit a word document.
And how much of that bloat in Word is useful information?
If I open word, type the letter 'a', and save the document, it's a 20K document.
If you type 'a' 2000 times, it's still a 22K document.
What the heck is in that other 99.9% of the document?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Apple II (1 MHz 6502) did animated graphics with sound and controlled floppy access while polling the keyboard (The Bard's Tale)
Amiga (14 MHz 68000) had complete GUI, multi-tasking, on 256K RAM.
The old saying that "Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh" is about right. The CPU's have gotten faster, with the Microsoft O/S taking more and more cycles to do the same thing.
I haven't had to set an IRQ or DMA setting in years. I've not had to mess with himem or any other arcane memory configs and boot disks, restarting my entire system each time I want to run a different game.
Each time I plug in a new joystick and it just works, each time I plug in a new digital camera and it's just there as another drive, each time I alt-tab out of a game, check a walkthrough website, then alt-tab back, I think back to the old days where code was really efficient and didn't do any wasteful background tasks like that.
I remember helping a friend with a C++ assignment, via the net. Each time, she'd have to exit her telnet program, run Borland's C++ compiler from the command line, check the output, quit the compiler, reopen telnet, reconnect to the MUD we were talking over, then describe what had happened. Now... She'd just show me what's on her desktop via Messenger while we kept chatting.
And if some cycles get used up doing weird UI gimicks that I'll never use - like making the UI scalable so the partially sighted can use it, I'm willing to trade that.
For all those reasons, I'm more than happy that my 2^(years / 1.5) faster PC "wastes" all of those extra cycles. And that's before we get on to things like built in spell checkers and real time code debugging as I write it.
I don't want a 2^(years / 1.5) faster experience. I want all those cycles put in to making things work closer and closer to how I just expect them to work.
I don't know about anyone else but I can't code 2^(years / 1.5) faster so I wouldn't be able to keep up with that damn responsive text based compiler. On the other hand, I am that much faster overall as I now call an API that adds all that "bloatware" instead of having to code my own damn mouse drivers, my code is largely debugged on the fly and I can't remember the last time I lost several days just trying to format a newsletter in to columns.
So, before saying the cycles are wasted:
Pick an every day but semi complex task that people do now. For example: For a homework project, go on line, grab half a dozen graphics and ten blocks of text from those websites, put them all in to a stylishly laid out newsletter format. Do that on a P4, then do it on an a DOS PC from 15 years ago.
See if matching the same quality of work doesn't take you 2^10 times as long on that old PC, assuming you can even do it at all.
Those cycles aren't wasted. Sure, we do the same basic tasks but we do them with vastly more flexability and don't have to waste days of our lives wrestling with configs to do what we now consider simple tasks. That's where the speed is.
The dekstop files & folders paradigm is fine if marketing dweebs stop designing wizards that hide simplicity in a layer of complexity. What if I had a maid who said "I see you just set a piece of paper on your desk? Do you want me to file it for you? Great, I'll just shred this original while I'm at it, and you can conveniently ask me to find it whenever you need it!"
Example 1:
My dad plugs in his digital camera, and it displays a camera wizard. Great! It asks for the album name and places it in a convenient album with a nice slide-show.
The next day, he wants to edit one of the pictures, or copy it, or rename it. Too bad. Because it's now in a proprietary format in an album management program. The wizard was completely unnecessary. It have been easier for him to create a folder and drag the files into it. It would have functioned in the normal way files and folders work. He would know where they are, and could open, email, rename, delete, etc.
Another example: .MP3 file? No? Maybe it's a .WMV file? .OGG? .WAV? No... it's in the media library. And there it lies forever. You can't play it with anything else. Now I show her how to use CDEX, and click the CDDB button, then the RIP button, then whoa! And she can do whatever she wants with it.
My mom inserts a CD and Media Player asks her if she wants to rip the files to the media library. It even does a CDDB lookup and names the albums accordingly. Great! So where's that
Now I want to email that file. But I can't. Because it's not in a file on the file system, it's hiding in some "convenient" media library for me. And I want to view the pictures in the order the camera took them.
I agree completely. I've done some programming for OS-9, and when we were creating some software libraries, we had to do was worry about things like program footprint size and memory allocation/deallocation. We were using a cross-compiler and doing development in C and C++. Something as simple as the order in which you declare the variables could make a noticeable difference in program size. Memory allocation and deallocation had to be done by the top level of the program. The support libraries had to be written to accept a memory block to use and how large it was. The last thing we wanted to do was use up the 4MB of RAM (which had to hold the OS, plus any programs you were running) we had by making large chunks of it unusable because it first was malloc()'ed, then free()'ed. We didn't want to risk having whatever garbage collection scheme existed to be able to properly operate... assuming there even was one. (This was 1997.)
Of course, if you want speed, you have to learn to take advantage of the "short circuit" of && and ||. While nobody's really going to notice the several nanoseconds you might use up by doing !strncmp(str1, str2, n), when you process millions of rows from a database, it can make a big difference by not forcing a program pointer jump by saying
if (str1[0] == 'a' && !strncmp(str1, str2, n))...
The mindset we have now is a direct result of the prevailing attitude that memory is cheap and processors get faster. A friend of mine is no longer asked to interview prospective candidates because he would always ask questions about optimizing code and making it run faster. The candidates nearly always had the look of a deer caught by headlights, and these supposedly knowledgable programmers (interviewee AND interviewers) couldn't answer these questions.
OCO is Loco
If you have the entire contents in memory you can be assured of not skipping if there becomes contention for the disk. iTunes on the mac is famous for not skipping no matter the system load, guess why?
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The parent was understandably modded a troll, but I have to say that I agree with the sentiment, if not the exact words. My recent experience with OSX and the iLife apps is exactly that: Apple writes software that is very slick and nice for the average user, but really limited and arguably even broken for the user with atypical or demanding needs.
My wife's new iBook is pretty, but if it were my iBook, it'd be running Linux by now.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I could use resizable and rotatable vector fonts, create and import both bitmap and vector graphics, and load both a spellchecker and thesaurus in my copy of GeoWrite that ran under GeoWorks Ensemble 2.1 and MS-DOS 3.3 in 1991.
Not only that, but the program was well-designed enough to provide four different levels of UI complexity (allowing new users to use it without getting lost while expert users could enable all the features and even customize the toolbars), and the PC/GEOS environment itself provided multiple threads per process and preemptive multitasking but was fast enough to be considered "fast" on my 286 with 1MB of RAM and a VGA card.
The PC/GEOS folks got around the bloat because they were interested in doing so, and they were successful in almost all respects.
Modern coders seem a lot less interested in doing so, perhaps because so many of them take the bloat for granted. It wasn't always so, as many of us remember...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
When I bought a Centris 650 in the early 90's, it was noticably faster--so much faster that I brought it to work to show my boss, as I was sure he would not believe my stories of how fast it was.
This same thing has happened to me with every generation of PCs, too...it's not just a Mac thing. I buy a new machine, and marvel at how much faster it is.
Furthermore, I can go the other way to verify this. I still have my Centris 650 in storage, and booted it up a couple years ago. It was so slow that I could not believe that I ever found such a slow machine usable.
What is really going on is that it doesn't take us long to get used to a fast machine, and since we normally never go back, we don't realize just how much faster things are now.
Thanks for the link. Here's one from the jargon file about real programmers.
The Story of Mel
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather
(nather@astro.as.utexas.edu), on May 21, 1983.
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:
Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software" sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.
Lest a whole new generation of programmers
grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,
I feel duty-bound to describe,
as best I can through the generation gap,
how a Real Programmer wrote code.
I'll call him Mel,
because that was his name.
I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp.,
a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company.
The firm manufactured the LGP-30,
a small, cheap (by the standards of the day)
drum-memory computer,
and had just started to manufacture
the RPC-4000, a much-improved,
bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer.
Cores cost too much,
and weren't here to stay, anyway.
(That's why you haven't heard of the company,
or the computer.)
I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler
for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.
Mel didn't approve of compilers.
"If a program can't rewrite its own code",
he asked, "what good is it?"
Mel had written,
in hexadecimal,
the most popular computer program the company owned.
It ran on the LGP-30
and played blackjack with potential customers
at computer shows.
Its effect was always dramatic.
The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show,
and the IBM salesmen stood around
talking to each other.
Whether or not this actually sold computers
was a question we never discussed.
Mel's job was to re-write
the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
(Port? What does that mean?)
The new computer had a one-plus-one
addressing scheme,
in which each machine instruction,
in addition to the operation code
and the address of the needed operand,
had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
the next instruction was located.
In modern parlance,
every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
Put that in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.
Mel loved the RPC-4000
because he could optimize his code:
that is, locate instructions on the drum
so that just as one finished its job,
the next would be just arriving at the "read head"
and available for immediate execution.
There was a program to do that job,
an "optimizing assembler",
but Mel refused to use it.
"You never know where it's going to put things",
he explained, "so you'd have to use separate constants".
It was a long time before I understood that remark.
Since Mel knew the numerical value
of every operation code,
and assigned his own drum addresses,
every instruction he wrote could also be considered
a numerical constant.
He could pick up an earlier "add" instruction, say,
and multiply by it,
if it had the right numeric value.
His code was not easy for someone else to modify.
I compared Mel's hand-optimized programs
with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembler program,
and Mel's always ran faster.
That was beca
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.