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posted by martyb on Saturday December 30 2017, @06:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the perhaps-providing-prompt-prompts-prompts-perceived-performance-primacy dept.

Have you ever had that nagging sensation that your computer was slower than it used to be? Or that your brand new laptop seemed much more sluggish than an old tower PC you once had? Dan Luu, a computer engineer who has previously worked at Google and Microsoft, had the same sensation, so he did what the rest of us would not: He decided to test a whole slew of computational devices ranging from desktops built in 1977 to computers and tablets built this year. And he learned that that nagging sensation was spot on—over the last 30 years, computers have actually gotten slower in one particular way.

Not computationally speaking, of course. Modern computers are capable of complex calculations that would be impossible for the earliest processors of the personal computing age. The Apple IIe, which ended up being the “fastest” desktop/laptop computer Luu tested, is capable of performing just 0.43 million instructions per second (MIPS) with its MOS 6502 processor. The Intel i7-7700k, found in the most powerful computer Luu tested, is capable of over 27,000 MIPS.

But Luu wasn’t testing how fast a computer processes complex data sets. Luu was interested in testing how the responsiveness of computers to human interaction had changed over the last three decades, and in that case, the Apple IIe is significantly faster than any modern computer.

https://gizmodo.com/the-one-way-your-laptop-is-actually-slower-than-a-30-ye-1821608743


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday December 31 2017, @06:16AM (2 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday December 31 2017, @06:16AM (#616089) Journal

    Exactly.

    Every improvement in processing power in the last 40 years was gobbled up by look and feel.

    Oddly, they could get away with it because the processing power available when you simply stopped dicking around with the screen for 10 seconds was sufficient to meet all or our actual computational needs for a month or two.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Sunday December 31 2017, @08:18AM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Sunday December 31 2017, @08:18AM (#616104) Journal
    You should RTFA, because it actually explains a lot of the delay.

    First, keyboard scan rates are actually lower. The Apple IIe keyboard gave you a delay of about 8.6ms, whereas a modern keyboard gives you closer to 18ms (purely from scan speed, ignoring the USB overhead). At the other end, the Apple IIe drew directly into the frame buffer, synchronised with the monitor refresh. This gave you a minimum delay of the refresh of one field of an interlaced monitor, so 1/50th of a second (20ms). If you have a 60MHz TFT and you draw directly to the frame buffer then you can get similar speeds, but if you're double buffering (and you want to, because otherwise you get tearing) then you're going to always be drawing one frame behind and so you're now at 50ms just from keyboard and monitor delays.

    Basically, even if the software is infinitely fast, you're going to see 50-60ms on a modern computer.

    That said, there's no excuse for the ones that were over 120ms.

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    • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday December 31 2017, @02:42PM

      by Nuke (3162) on Sunday December 31 2017, @02:42PM (#616138)

      Yes TFA is about keyboard delay. However, that is only of the extra delays these days. Look and feel bling is another, official spyware another, Javascriptcrap on the internat another.