Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

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The evolution of technology has certainly been interesting. I remember a lecturer once told me that everything old is new again. Basically we go in cycles.

We started with mainframes, then mini-computers and then micro-computers (PCs/Macs). What happened in the last 10 years? Through the "cloud" we basically went back to large computers and timesharing again.

Another turning point in the last 10 years is that basically any PC made since 2000 will probably be sufficient for what most normal users want. We get increasingly powerful CPUs that most people just don't need.

This is part of the reason for the move to lower power consumption. A smaller form factor and lighter computer is something most people care about. Having 6 cores instead of 4 just isn't.

Many pundits have predicted that Web applications will take over. 5-10 years ago there was a reasonable basis for this opinion. Computers would get increasingly powerful and that headroom would make the otherwise horribly inefficient Javascript medium (compared to the compiled languages like C/C++ or even the bytecode languages like Java/C#) dominant as the inefficiencies become irrelevant.

The rise of native apps on mobile is another example of this cycle. Part of this is that native apps have access to libraries that Web pages simply don't but part of it really is performance and the fact that performance once again matters.

Personally I find the manufacturing of chips at 22nm to be simply amazing. When I started paying attention to this stuff IIRC the 386/486 were done on 500nm+ lithography.

I do wonder what the future holds because that number just can't physically get much smaller (with current lithographic techniques).

It's amazing how much power a small chip can get now. I have one of the latest Macbook Airs and it can decode 10 video streams without the fan coming on. A friend has the Core 2 Duo MBA (last year's) and his machine is dying under the same load.

"Another turning point in the last 10 years is that basically any PC made since 2000 will probably be sufficient for what most normal users want. We get increasingly powerful CPUs that most people just don't need."

That's being quite generous to the Pentium 4. Really the last 4-5 years is when acceptably good CPU power in any circumstance for normal users became the norm. The Core series of processors is what first gave us the sort of power that we've come to expect and Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge and now Ivy Bridge are all just improvements on that.

Also, according to cpu world, the original 80386 was done on on 1.5µm lithography.

Depends on your software stack, too: the Athlon system I bought in 2000 had no trouble running a web browser with multiple windows while simultaneously compiling, transcoding DV, having email & IM open, etc. on BeOS.

We've gained in many areas but I think it took the hail-mary SSD migration to dodge the usability hit from poor I/O scheduling on Windows, OS X, Linux, etc. This is far from saying BeOS was perfect (e.g. networking was wretched, there was no pervasive color management or visual quality from the switch to GPU compositing) but rather that some of our memories are colored more by the software than underlying hardware.

Just a note, but imho video decoding these days is not very good benchmark on performance, as it is usually handled by somewhat specialized hardware decoder instead the general purpose CPU (even if they both are integrated on the same physical chip).

Forgive me, but I'm not familiar with general purpose CPU's that 'usually' have a specialized hardware decoder on board for video decoding.

Which CPUs specifically do you mean?

Dear downvoters, thank you very much for showing that HN is a place where simply asking a question is already reason to get downvoted.

I'll try to answer your question on why some people might have downvoted you. In spoken English we can use a wide variety of tones to indicate things like sarcasm or strong disagreement when asking a question. Translating this into written English isn't totally straightforward, but one common way of signalling these things is to use scare quotes[2]. In this way writing "Why do you say its usually like that" and "Why do you say its 'usually' like that?" have the same literal meaning but the later has a belligerent or sarcastic subtext. In general, if you don't want to come off as disagreeable you should never put quotes just around single words like usually, and especially not words or phrases that weren't actually used in the conversation like "off die" when questioning them. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes

Because I'm quoting that specific word from the original text as the one that confused me.

As for the differences between written/spoken English, I'm a non-native speaker/writer with plenty of experience but stuff like this will probably forever delude me.

GPUs have included specialized video decoder hardware for the last several generations[1]. Now that the GPUs are being integrated with the CPUs, that capability is available there too.

[1]e.g http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder

Yes, I know about the decoders on video cards, I'm interested in the ones where it is 'common' (or 'usually' as the OP uses it) to see them integrated with regular CPUs in the same package but 'off die'.

Basically all non-netbook laptops sold within the last 6 months have a CPU that has on-die video decoding, but many (though still a minority) desktops don't. I'm not sure why you're bringing MCMs into the discussion, those were the norm in Intel laptops for about a year before that with the Nehalem chips in laptops, but right now the only MCMs being sold are server chips which don't have GPUs at all, but rather require more silicon than can economically be produced in one piece.

All Intel Sandy Bridge processors with an enabled GPU have them, also all AMD Fusion APU processors.

Thank you.

>Another turning point in the last 10 years is that basically any PC made since 2000 will probably be sufficient for what most normal users want. We get increasingly powerful CPUs that most people just don't need.

This is utterly ridiculous. My 2009 ASUS laptop struggles with Starcraft 2. I'm NOT happy with that. And it's not like I'm some extreme outlier playing FPS action games, either. I just want a to play a really popular, really mainstream game. The people who don't even want more power than a year 2000 PC are the old, the slow adopters and the boring.

Gaming is often considered to lay outside "what normal users want". It's also an area where laptops are especially weak, and I'd guess that even in your case the GPU is more limiting factor than CPU. Reasonably built gaming desktop from 2009 would certainly run Starcraft 2.

> Another turning point in the last 10 years is that basically any PC made since 2000 will probably be sufficient for what most normal users want.

I bought a desktop PC back in 2001 that I used daily until early 2010. In those 9 years, I'd bought 5 other systems (laptops & desktops). I used the old system daily because it had all my "stuff" on it, it never felt slow for 90% of the work I was doing, and I had keyboard/mouse sharing with a newer system for the other 10%. I'm still amazed I used it for so long.

The march of lithographic manufacturing looks fascinating, considering we are already so close to atomic scale:

Van der Waals radius of the atom of silicon is 0.21 nm. So next year our transistors will be 100 atoms wide?

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