Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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Yes (it is hard). Since those "other" are not that many -- most people just do web, text processing, Excel, mails, gaming etc, for which cpu power is plenty.

Now, even if we take some specialized tasks that need more CPU (but are niche anyway):

- For image processing, we had Photoshop doing wonders since at least 2000. And with SSDs, we can view and edit 30+ MP images today faster than we could 8K images back in 2000 (and on 4K displays nowadays). We can very much cover all things web and print just fine.

- For video processing, a fast latest box can edit several streams of 4K with live filters. That's beyond what $200,000 professional boxes could do in the early nineties.

- For audio processing, a MacBook Pro i7 can run more audio channels and effects than what the consoles used for Thriller or The Wall had in million dollar professional studios.

We also need to understand the concept of diminishing returns. E.g. It's not like having an NLE rendering time down from 2 hours to 1 minute will enable us to make more movies. It will just save some editing studios and amateurs some time. Other processes involved in movie making (like just setting the lights appropriately for a shoot) trump this "optimization" many times over.

So it's not like people "need" faster processors. It's more like they would be "nice to have".

Now, for things like HPC for research etc, could indeed use faster processors -- but that's an even more niche market.

You can never have enough cpu power in gaming. You can always use more. The faster computers get, the more interesting games can get.

Not until content creation tools get smarter. When your level is made of simple tiles in 2D top-down perspective, you can have large levels with lots of sprites, but when each character has to be a fully rigged 3D model and each tree rather than being an 8x8 pixel smudge is instead a fully 3D physical object with leaves that respond realistically to wind... Well, it's hard to make them by hand.

>The faster computers get, the more interesting games can get.

I've found the opposite. The faster computers get, the more games are all about BS graphics and nice explosions. Back in my day we had real interesting adventure games, now get off my lawn.

Back in your day minecraft would not be possible

Considering that it's quite inefficient and written in Java, it might very well be. Especially graphics wise, it's nothing that mid to late nineties GPUs couldn't handle.

Minecraft was memory-bound and bandwidth-bound such that it only really became possible in the late 2000's. A typical PC in 2000 would have, if generous, 128 or 256 megabytes of RAM. A typical connection, if any, would be dial up, with some ADSL and ISDN folks. Minecraft worlds, on the other hand, easily run into the gigabytes. Not to mention that all of its word of mouth came from popular Youtube videos.

You can definitely find examples of earlier voxel renderers that are also more efficient than Minecraft(e.g. Ken Silverman's VOXLAP), but memory limits and networking gaps would remain real and intractable, limiting its potential popularity.

>but memory limits and networking gaps would remain real and intractable

Those don't have much to do with Moore's law though.

Moore's law is about transistor counts and DRAM is made of transistors so it really does.

Mainstream games, sure. But what about indie games? Those have exploded due to computers becoming fast and cheap.

It still takes a good few minutes to compile my current project at work (c++ compiles slowly), I could definitely use a 100x improvement there to bring it down to a couple seconds (no, I don't often need to compile it all from scratch but I would still pay good money for such an improvement).

That would only make them work you harder.

https://xkcd.com/303/

How about all the industries like HFT or AdTech? You mentioned yourself research, there is a dire need for computing power (and I don't think it's that much of a niche).

Don't you think all these machine learning oriented start-up would like more CPU? How about big data platform?

It's very narrow minded to think that the only market is people using their laptop in their home office.

That there is a market doesn't mean there is a need. If HFT were forced into millisecond processing regimes instead of microsecond, what would be the impact to anyone? It wouldn't even affect the HFT guys as long as their competitors were likewise limited.

>How about all the industries like HFT or AdTech? You mentioned yourself research, there is a dire need for computing power (and I don't think it's that much of a niche). Don't you think all these machine learning oriented start-up would like more CPU? How about big data platform?

I don't think society would have any serious issues, in fact we might just be better off, without more efficient HFT and big data.

In fact, I'd ask for more regulated and slower-frequency trading, and smarter (rather than "big") data. And especially when it comes to surveillance and consumer behavior analysis (for ads, etc.), the less data those scumbags get, the better.

> but that's an even more niche market.

Tell that to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace and others. HPC powers a large swath of the internet these days.

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