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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 31 2017, @11:32AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 31 2017, @11:32AM (#616115)

    Why would low-speed vs. full-speed possibly matter for a keyboard? Can someone type a million characters per second? Latency isn't different by more than a few microseconds.

    Only difference is probably just the version of the protocol implemented by the interface chip, and has no impact on performance.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @02:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @02:45AM (#616315)

    Yes, if the keyboard is polled every 10ms, it means that key that was hit 0.5ms since last report, has to wait 0.5 ms in the 1 ms rate and 9.5 ms in the 10 ms rate (milliseconds, 1/1000 of second, not microseconds) to be noticed. A 60Hz screen refreshes every 16 ms, for comparison.

    So in one case the keyboard could report 16 times per frame, while in the other it reports twice at best, and in some cases only once (think about the out of sync pattern 0, 10, 20, 30, 40 for keyboard but 0, 16, 32, 48 for screen). That is jitter, and will make things worse, as delay varies and your worst case is not very good as they are both very similar so sometimes it's too late, and never fast. The rendering will have less time to react or will have to give up until next frame in a repetitive yet weird pattern.