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Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

"general computer responsiveness" at this point is 100% on software/OS - QNX for example was perfectly responsive in the 90s on Pentium II class hardware (and you can probably find earlier examples with weaker CPUs like BeOS on early PPC, but these were just the first to come to my mind - someone will probably chime in below with Amiga anecdotes or something).

I refuse to believe at current high end intel/amd levels (i7-9 & ryzen 7-9) & even mid-range that lack of responsiveness is due to the CPU rather than windows/mac.

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> I refuse to believe at current high end intel/amd levels (i7-9 & ryzen 7-9) & even mid-range that lack of responsiveness is due to the CPU rather than windows/mac.

You are right, of course, in that the fault lies with software. But holding the software as constant, the only way to improve responsiveness is to up your core speed and IPC.

It's not as if the average user can email Microsoft of the Chrome browser team and ask them to make the OS/Browser more responsive for their older hardware. But they _can_ go to the store and buy a faster CPU, most of the time.

The situation was probably reversed a few decades ago, when hardware was actually expensive and multi-core was not a thing.

I think the responsiveness problem will be tackled by specialized memory controllers like where the new gaming consoles are headed

When MS Office is written in JavaScript[0] instead of C, I have zero hope of the responsiveness problem ever being fixed. It’s only getting worse.

[0] - I’m talking about Office 365 which runs in a web browser (yet somehow is no slower than the “native” version that runs on my desktop computer).

And Google docs somehow faster than either

Sure it was. Back then screens had 16+ times less pixels (multiply it by 2-8 for text mode), Linux (the kernel) source code was still relatively small, and the games played had 10 2D levels of a few million pixels each.

16 times less pixels, but our systems are now literally over 50 times faster, and that's only considering clock speeds of a single core and ignores IPC improvements.

Huh? Pentium II had clock speeds 233-450MHz, which is only 10x less Hz. And the RAM bandwidth did not even improve 10x since P2.

Ah crap. I misread a comment above which mentioned "the 90s" and in my mind I though 90 Mhz.

I'm not talking about games, I'm talking general computer use responsiveness. the difference in computing resources between a pentium II @ 266mhz and modern-day CPUs is much bigger than 16x and even back then win95 was a lot slower than it should have been (we were saying basically the same thing - "why is this 266mhz PII not feeling any faster than my old 8mhz amiga?").

Again the "poster boy" for responsive interaction is probably BeOS - the original BeBox used dual ppc 603 CPUs at 66mhz: if you consider IPC, Mhz & number of cores a modern CPU probably has 1000x the computation power at its disposal & RAM is also generally 1000x more plentiful (we have as many GBs as we used to have MBs back then). I'll bet with GPUs the difference is even bigger.

Back then, to write a pixel you did, at most, 3 memory writes. Now you need to write those bits to a bitmap and pass it on to the GPU, which will combine it with all the rest of the stuff needed to make your screen happen and, hopefully, you'll see something in a couple screen refresh cycles.

Single 4k screen @ 60Hz requires transfer rate of 3840x2160x3 bytes 60 times per second = ~1.5GB/s just to copy pixels without any logic applied.

Typical RAM module (DDR-266) in late 90s could only provide ~2.1GB/s, leaving almost no room to perform any compute on a single 4k screen, and simply insufficient to run two of them.

PC66 of early 90s could only do 0.5GB/s.

DDR3, commonly used now in integrated GPUs does 13GB/s.

What I am getting at, is that the task to just copy pixels to a screen became proportionally harder as RAM progressed forward (26x faster per module since 1990, 6.5x per module since 1999 vs 60x more work per screen since 1990 (256 colors), 10x per screen since 1999).

And that is just screen rendering. Same happened to source code, documents, images, everything.

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