1K = 210
It is not something urgent, or something which happened suddenly. But still...
It occurred to me that since I entered the computing world in 1992 or 1993 - for some unclear reason, I got an i486DX/33MHz (later tuned to 40MHz by manually exchanging the oscillator, thus overclocking everything inside) with 4MB RAM (later extended to 8MB) and a 120MB Seagate hard disk (it headcrashed, same as a later 300MB Maxtor) as a gift back then; a high-end working machine (its OEM maker brand OKANO has all but vanished since then) - since that time, numbers have multiplied.
Core frequencies have risen 100-fold. RAM has grown by a factor of around 1000, or 210. Hard disks have grown even beyond this scale - more or less 6000x. Even the size of the computer I use has shrunk to around 0.5%.
We can run more programs simultaneously - maybe ten times more. They are more colorful, compared to the 256 colors of SVGA. We can listen to more music and stream video from the Internet. Connecting peripherals is a breeze.
What is comes down to, though, is a perceived productivity gain of much less than 1000, or even ten. Where did this performance go?
Unless software development is closely coupled with hardware performance gains, this means that software complexity is rising by, say, a factor of 100 over the time in question, and if hardware won't keep pushing the limits the way it did, we'll face a slowing increase of software feature growth.
Maybe that's not too bad, even. At least for my own project, some time for a rewrite from scratch would be a good thing.
It occurred to me that since I entered the computing world in 1992 or 1993 - for some unclear reason, I got an i486DX/33MHz (later tuned to 40MHz by manually exchanging the oscillator, thus overclocking everything inside) with 4MB RAM (later extended to 8MB) and a 120MB Seagate hard disk (it headcrashed, same as a later 300MB Maxtor) as a gift back then; a high-end working machine (its OEM maker brand OKANO has all but vanished since then) - since that time, numbers have multiplied.
Core frequencies have risen 100-fold. RAM has grown by a factor of around 1000, or 210. Hard disks have grown even beyond this scale - more or less 6000x. Even the size of the computer I use has shrunk to around 0.5%.
We can run more programs simultaneously - maybe ten times more. They are more colorful, compared to the 256 colors of SVGA. We can listen to more music and stream video from the Internet. Connecting peripherals is a breeze.
What is comes down to, though, is a perceived productivity gain of much less than 1000, or even ten. Where did this performance go?
Unless software development is closely coupled with hardware performance gains, this means that software complexity is rising by, say, a factor of 100 over the time in question, and if hardware won't keep pushing the limits the way it did, we'll face a slowing increase of software feature growth.
Maybe that's not too bad, even. At least for my own project, some time for a rewrite from scratch would be a good thing.
Labels: Tech
posted by PJS at
Saturday, February 09, 2008
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