Have computers stopped getting faster?

Johnmcl7

As a few people have mentioned, raw performance for mainstream consumers isn't that important any more so the focus more recently has been on power efficiency and batterylife as thinner, lighter machines with better batterylife are very much what most consumers now want. Hence the last couple of generations of Intel U series processors have been focused on power efficiency while the current Broadwell range is only available in low power forms while Intel have turned around on Atom (one of their lowest power processors) to make it one of their main focuses.

In the server market where performance is still important, it is still increasing - take this beast of a processor example;

http://ark.intel.com/products/81061/

A few years ago you could only have one core per processor per socket so if you needed four sockets, you'd need a fairly hefty server with four sockets. That processor has 18 cores on its own and each of those is hyperthreaded as well which means in a two way configuration you'd have a staggering 144 simultaneous threads.

prowla

quidsinquentin wrote: »

And there was me thinking a Mac was a PC.

Who knew?

A Mac is a PC; I'm using one right now.

prowla

And back to the question...

Computers are certainly getting more powerful: more memory, more CPU cores, faster i/o, SSDs, faster memory.

(It does seem that just over 3 GHz for the underlying processor clock speed may be around for a while though.)

itGuyUK80

You know what I have not actually thought about the development in hardware for last few years, so would agree that things have not changed in last 2 to 3 years..

As pointed out focus has mainly towards mobility products rather than fixed based units. At this moment there is still requirement for fixed based machines until new revolution comes along.

Everything is trying to be moved to the cloud, but I personally believe that current cloud technology will not be a complete replacement for fixed units; plus the security in the cloud will always be a concern. In fact, Air Gap systems (not connected to internet) are now vulnerable. Article Link

On the flip side to this old technology still has it place. Having the latest and greatest machine is not always the best option; especially if you are using small percent of the machine capabilities that is not while worth investment or good return on investment.

Support for Windows 7 does not end until approx Jan 2020, so there is still potential for consumers and business to make good use of Windows 7 without the need get Windows 8.1 (Support ends Jan 2023).

My own opinion is that things will reach a peak moment and then become stale; sitting back a little I cannot remember the last time I actually got excited about new technology, my response lately has been that's nice with a sarcastic tone.

To sum this up both new and old technology will have a place, just the problem is that majority of end-users have no clear understanding what to purchase for what application.

Ben84

My computer became notably faster when I put an SSD in it.

The speed at which anything happens really is down to the slowest step in the process. For many of us, it's a mechanical HDD taking a long time do load data while every other component is sitting around waiting. Or when loading things from a slow internet connection. Processors in modern computers don't tend to be the slowest step in many cases and aren't usually the reason why we have to wait for stuff to happen.

almillar

The only thing that stalled is the frequency of the processors. That's how many cycles the processor does in a second - 3.6GHz is quoted above, as in 3,600,000,000,000 instrictions per second. That's single core. The hihger the frequency, the higher the temperature. But if you've got dual core, and the OS and program supports doing 2 things at once, it could be twice as fast (just about), at the same frequency. And guess what quad core manages?
So we've just moved away from pure speed to more intelligent speed, and yes, as some people have said, it takes bulkier apps and OSs to take advantage.
A Spectrum 48k has a Chess programme that could whip most people, so it depends on what you need to do with your computer!

Mr_Toad

jaydeeuk1 wrote: »

This. As a developer i could spend months making code more efficient so it takes up a small memory footprint or will happily trundle along on one core.

Careful, you know what they say about that point where the project manager has to shoot the developer.

Or i could get it out the door and begin next project to get more money in, knowing it will run 'good enough'

I well remember RAD (Rapid Application Development) or "I don't want it perfect, I want it on Thursday" great unless you ended up supporting the system in question, no documentation, inefficient code......the list goes on.

When I was learning coding we lost points if the lecturer could do it using less code. Mars bars were given to those who beat him.

I_have_spoken

The capacity of a single mass-market CPU probably hasn't massively advanced, 4Ghz quad core has been around for a while.

Some type of computing have benefited from the advance in GPUs, with graphics cards now doing 30fps at 1920*1080 with all the features of shadows, textures etc. which has benefited gamers (and bit-coin miners)

There have also been developments in search, so Google can now search the content of a hugely greater number of web-sites in a few ms.

But the hard problem remains; viz. how to take a program that runs on one CPU and re-design it to run in parallel over 10s, 100s to 1000s of CPU

Cycrow

Mr_Toad wrote: »

Careful, you know what they say about that point where the project manager has to shoot the developer.



I well remember RAD (Rapid Application Development) or "I don't want it perfect, I want it on Thursday" great unless you ended up supporting the system in question, no documentation, inefficient code......the list goes on.

When I was learning coding we lost points if the lecturer could do it using less code. Mars bars were given to those who beat him.

of course, less code doesn't always mean more efficient, it depends what that code compiles down to.

most of the time, developers will sacrifice efficiency for ease of editing. Just looks at many games now, alot use some kind of scripting to do certain tasks. Hardcoding that into the engine may be more efficent, but using the scripts means you can get other programmers, or even artists who can edit them with ease without needing to know the full workings of the core engine

poppellerant

Processors are always increasing in terms of computational power, but not so much in the last few years. Quite rightly so in my opinion, they are looking how to get the most out of a chip while trying not to waste energy. As a result, increases in computational power are slower than some would like to see.

Harddrives have become slightly slower in access time in my opinion, but faster in sequential read/write times. So, in layman’s terms, the time to read 100 x 1MB files has slowed down (in my opinion), but the time to read a single 100MB file has sped up. This is good for storing files, such as films, large photographs onto a harddrive.

We now have SSD drives, which can completely transform a user's computer experience. These can read any size file very, very quickly! To compare, some of the fastest SSD drives could probably read a single 1GB file in the time it takes a harddrive to read a single 150MB file. Random access is so quick with SSD drives, it literally isn't a problem.