24-core CPU and I can’t type an email

Re:24-core CPU and I can’t type an email by oso2k on Friday August 17, 2018 @02:10PM (#17784649)

This has nothing to do with Moore's Law or improving processors directly. If anything, this is a software optimization problem. Half of what I mentioned was locks and schedulers, which are directly software problems. Layer on the fact that a helloworld application in most languages and frameworks is 100s of KB to dozens of MBs, and you have really, really, unoptimized software. 30 years ago, lots of software was written in Assembly and some C. But software has gotten fatter and slower at a much much faster rate than hardware has gotten faster/more parallel since the industry introduced ILP, caches, multi-stage instruction pipelines, etc. with the Pentium/5x86 class microcomputers & processors. Most people never learn to write multi-processing, multi-threaded, multi-programming, event-driven, decentralized or distributed applications. The model that browsers and most languages & frameworks provide is usually inherently sequential and single processing.

If web developers never learn to write multi-processing, multi-threaded, multi-programming, event-driven, decentralized or distributed applications the web will forever look like it looks today.

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Re:24-core CPU and I can’t type an email by speedplane on Saturday August 18, 2018 @01:44AM (#17787062)

> This has nothing to do with Moore's Law or improving processors directly. If anything, this is a software optimization problem.

This is such a contradictory sentence. The whole point of Moore's law was that software developers could do what they want, freed by limitations of hardware because in 18 months, when their product was ready for launch, the hardware became capable enough to handle it.

Forcing developers to focus more and more on performance (via threading, distributed systems, and custom die co-processors), rather than innovating new applications, is a huge shift. It's like the hardware developers gave up, and tell the software developers that it's in your hands now.

Also, comparing a hello world program 10 years ago to today is a meaningless comparison because no one uses hello world to do anything. A better example would be Excel in 1998 and Excel in 2018. Sure today, it's a 500 megabytes instead of a just a handful, but it does quite a bit more (for better or worse).

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Re:24-core CPU and I can’t type an email by oso2k on Saturday August 18, 2018 @02:13PM (#17789735)

You don't understand Moore's Law. Moore's Law says nothing about software devs doing what they want or processor speed or even hardware capabilities or qualities. It's about the manufacturing capability and integration by semiconductor fabs. Specifically, "Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years.' [0]. Hardware engineers never gave up; they're the reason your bloated apps takes 60 secs to startup instead of 3600 secs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

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