One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Vintage Xerox Alto

Re:One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Vintage Xe... by TekMol on Monday June 19, 2017 @02:23PM (#14589129)

    On a modern computer, a Javascript program
    can generate the Mandelbrot set in a fraction
    of a second, while the Alto took an hour.

Hm... a "fraction" could mean anything. If it's exactly a second, then the speedup factor would be about 3600x.

The Alto was built about 40 years ago, right? That would be 30% performance improvement per year. Is that about right for single cpu performance acceleration over the last 40 years?

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Re:One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Vintage Xe... by kalleboo on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @03:09AM (#14592711)

Well with this[0] implementation[1] my laptop can render 3840x2400 pixels at 60fps, so ignoring the larger resolution, so how about 1/60th of a second?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14588789

[1] Is using a GPU cheating? Are we comparing computer performance or CPU performance? The Alto didn't even have a CPU as we know it today...

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Re:One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Vintage Xe... by TekMol on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @04:15AM (#14592911)

[1] Well, a GPU is somewhat geared towards this kind of workload. Both comparisons (Alto to modern CPU and Alto to modern GPU) have some meaning.

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Re:One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Vintage Xe... by eru on Monday June 19, 2017 @03:19PM (#14589596)

30% improvement for net performance might actually be about right. Raw improvements were bigger, but software got slower.

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