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Comment by nemasu | Hacker News Reader

1986 wasn't even that long ago, it baffles me how far tech has advanced since then.

To give you a sense of perspective: Jet engines were finicky advanced technology in 1945. 28 years later, the Apollo program was over.

Yeah, but don't you get the feeling it has somehow slowed down in recent history ? I haven't felt the need to change my laptop in like... 3 years or something, while this would have been unthinkable just 10 years ago.

CPUs became 'fast enough' at the end of the noughties. It's not that tech has slowed down so much as there's not really so much of a pinch felt these days from bottlenecks.

As a comparison, my win98 box took 4.5 minutes to boot up, and frequently crashed hard. These days computers take 10-30 seconds to cold boot, and hard crashes are extremely rare - you don't encounter them in the normal course of operations. A faster boot back then had considerably tangible results. These days it's barely noticeable.

This is probably partially because of the limitations that CPUs ran into with the heat wall in the past decade.

I've just upgraded my early 2011 MB Pro with 16GB of RAM and SSD. Wow, was that refreshing.

Yeah, the SSD is what made a bit difference recently, but it does not change anything to the fact that CPU have more less stalled for laptops.

Disk, not CPU, has been the performance barrier for much of computing. Largely because of latency (from seek), which as yesterday's HN article noted, is something you're stuck with.

You can increase your CPU capacity through palatalization (up to Amdahl's limit), but disk sucks no matter what. Yes, with multiple channels you get better overall throughput, but if you need two blocks that aren't contiguous but are on the same media, you've just bought an eternity in compute time.

SSD cracks that barrier, and does it pretty spectactularly, so yes, it's been a pretty big breakthrough.

The next phase may well be localization of a lot of services which are now centrally web-hosted. While in aggregate, people need a lot of compute power, individually, it's not much, and tools such as the FreedomBox offer the opportunity to put that close to you, while distributing data for both data integrity and thwarting surveillance (it's tough to run centralized surveillance over a decentralized architecture).

Round-trip time for SAAS is itself significant, as is browser load. Cracking both these nuts for the ultimate in edge-provisioned networks (the wall wart 6 feet from where you sit), and a movement away from browser-based apps to a lighter-weight frameworks which is based on network transport but doesn't impose a full browser overhead.

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