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The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

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837 points turrini | 1 comments | 13 May 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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titzer ◴[13 May 25 12:05 UTC] No.43971962[source]▶
I like to point out that since ~1980, computing power has increased about 1000X.

If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that), and we turned it on everywhere, we could have computers that are just a mere 950X faster.

If you went back in time to 1980 and offered the following choice:

I'll give you a computer that runs 950X faster and doesn't have a huge class of memory safety vulnerabilities, and you can debug your programs orders of magnitude more easily, or you can have a computer that runs 1000X faster and software will be just as buggy, or worse, and debugging will be even more of a nightmare.

People would have their minds blown at 950X. You wouldn't even have to offer 1000X. But guess what we chose...

Personally I think the 1000Xers kinda ruined things for the rest of us.

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scotty79 ◴[13 May 25 12:28 UTC] No.43972158[source]▶
Since 1980 maybe. But since 2005 it increased maybe 5x and even that's generous. And that's half of the time that passed and two decades.

https://youtu.be/m7PVZixO35c?si=px2QKP9-80hDV8Ui

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1. jandrese ◴[13 May 25 16:55 UTC] No.43975037[source]▶
2005 was Pentium 4 era.

For comparison: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1075vs5852/Intel-Pentiu...

That's about a 168x difference. That was from before Moores law started petering out.

For only a 5x speed difference you need to go back to the 4th or 5th generation Intel Core processors from about 10 years ago.

It is important to note that the speed figure above is computed by adding all of the cores together and that single core performance has not increased nearly as much. A lot of that difference is simply from comparing a single core processor with one that has 20 cores. Single core performance is only about 8 times faster than that ancient Pentium 4.