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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday May 23 2018, @06:47PM
from the your-computer-is-not-a-fast-PDP-11 dept.
from the your-computer-is-not-a-fast-PDP-11 dept.
Very interesting article at the IEEE ACM by David Chisnall.
In the wake of the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, it's worth spending some time looking at root causes. Both of these vulnerabilities involved processors speculatively executing instructions past some kind of access check and allowing the attacker to observe the results via a side channel. The features that led to these vulnerabilities, along with several others, were added to let C programmers continue to believe they were programming in a low-level language, when this hasn't been the case for decades.
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(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday May 23 2018, @10:42PM (1 child)
Hardware vs software performance has always been a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem. You can't just say that the CPUs get better at giving performance to the lazy, because a lot of software was built based on that level of performance.
You can idolize the programmers of yore if you want to, but the fact is that they wrote more efficient code because they had to. No programmer starts out building everything right. We all start by making something work, and only after it doesn't work fast enough do we ever go back and try to make it faster. The same goes for memory efficiency, avoiding I/O latency, maintainability, and any other metrics you can come up with for what makes "good" code.
It's the same with SSDs. The performance boost from replacing a spinning platter with an SSD has grown over time, because all software these days is developed on machines with them. The programmer does not experience the high latency of spinning disk I/O, so lots of software these days ships with synchronous file system access.
It's a self-perpetuating cycle. And it just happens to benefit the hardware manufacturer, who gets to keep selling new chips that are better at running the code that people started writing for the last set of chips.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday May 24 2018, @01:02PM
Of course we can. 'Built based on that level of performance' doesn't mean we can't compare the functionality-to-hardware-capability ratio and conclude that it's plummeted over the years.
'High-performance' applications like the Unreal Engine or scientific modelling, succeed in making good use of modern hardware. Desktop operating systems and word processors, on the other hand, do much the same as they did 20 years ago, but with vastly higher hardware requirements.
Well, kinda. I'm more inclined to credit competition in the hardware markets. If AMD and ARM imploded tomorrow, you think Intel would keep working hard on improving their products?