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

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837 points turrini | 2 comments | 13 May 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.407s | 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. voidspark ◴[14 May 25 10:57 UTC] No.43983023[source]▶
As the other guy said, top of the line CPUs today are roughly ~100x faster than 20 years ago. A single core is ~10x faster (in terms of instructions per second) and we have ~10x the number of cores.
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2. topaz0 ◴[14 May 25 13:14 UTC] No.43984153[source]▶
And the memory quantity, memory speed, disk speed are also vastly higher now than 20 years ago.