Computers: Faster or Slower than in the Past?

[sasKuatch]

Upon thinking, have computers actually gotten faster? Or do they do exactly the same thing with more eye candy. Have things like searches improved? Do programs start faster? Or does just everything look better and take as long as when you were loading programs off floppy disks, and dealing with bytes as opposed to megabytes?

[nextbillgates]

Yes :)

[BigFatJoe]

well...what if you combine non-eye-candy software with newer comp speeds?

[YorkshireYank]

isn't this along the same lines as the age old "chicken or egg" question?

Did the eye candy appear because computers can handle it better or did computers get bigger and better because users wanted more eye candy?

i think the first.... i mean.. it took, what 10 years to decode the human genome? how long would that have taken if the computers hadn't been constantly evolving?

[vbp6us]

or did computers get bigger and better because users wanted more eye candy

Computers didnt get bigger. They got much smaller and better.

:)

[bwkaz]

They're faster.

If you're afraid the eye candy is making everything run slower, quit using Windows XP. :D

-- this from the resident twm and minimal-GUI ... advocate

[Fryguy8]

go grab a pentium 100mhz with windows 95, and launch internet explorer 3.0

Now take your xxx GHZ machine with windows XP, and launch Internet explorer (6.0?)

If you don't happen to have a pentium 100mhz computer sitting around, let me assure you that the xxx ghz machine will load internet explorer faster, with more functionality, and be more stable while doing it.

[Can O' Beans]

I think a good comparison would be:

486sx running the latest(back then) 3D rendering program

vs

3GHz P4 running the latest(current) 3D rendering program



Theres not really that much that has changed with 3D software. The more powerfull computers now allow more complex designs to be rendered a lot faster then back in the day...

[2damncommon]

Check any DOS abandonware site for software to slow down your PC so that the old DOS games don't run so fast they can't be played.

[mrBen]

Computers have got faster, but applications have got slower and more bloated, thus negating the change in some cases.

[ehawk]

I run number-crunching fortran programs. It's easy to nice the difference in running these programs on the various computers around the office and lab. The computers are getting faster, computational task being held constant.

[TheCatMan]

A while back I raced a 486 50MHz loading Windows 3.11 against a Pantium 233 MHz loading Windows 95. The 486 had to pause for a boot menu and for me to type 'win' but it was still sitting looking smug for a minute or so before the Pentium got its breath back. My current 200MHz Linux box would probably beat the 486, except the creaky old BIOS taked 30 seconds just to notice I've switched on. :p
They all got whooped by my much older Sinclair Spectrum, booting in about 2 sec, but that took 4 minutes to load a program from tape.

[Nu-Bee]

Originally posted by sasKuatch
Upon thinking, have computers actually gotten faster? Or do they do exactly the same thing with more eye candy. Have things like searches improved? Do programs start faster? Or does just everything look better and take as long as when you were loading programs off floppy disks, and dealing with bytes as opposed to megabytes?

Wel, as a veteran beginning with DOS 3.2 in 1985 I can say unequivicably...."yes".

Sure, the programs are larger & take time to load sometimes, but you don't know -slow- till you have tried crunching a database or spreadsheet in First Choice on an 8088 processor (think 8086) at 4.5Mhz/8Mhz Turbo.

See an example here:

This was almost exactly like mine, but had more memory. (click this link) (http://home.wanadoo.nl/herbertb/txt/headstart.htm)

He's close, but it had an 8088 processor, and 640k memory was an upgrade "option".

So was the color monitor (RGB)...it came standard with your choice of either of 2 monochrome monitors....gold or green text. :)

I worked with -no hard drive- for several months. :)

[jetblackz]

Quote of the day: "the creaky old BIOS taked 30 seconds just to notice I've switched on." - I turned off graphics, so I don't get to see the smilies. I just memorized the locations of all buttons on the page.

Speed isn't the direction CPU chips are going. Hyper-threading is. Weird name, if you ask me. Multi-threading is more like it. The CPU does 2 threads at the same time, to be really multi-tasking(your regular CPU don't do that. It's just a programming technique behind the scene.).

[sasKuatch]

Originally posted by Can O' Beans
I think a good comparison would be:

486sx running the latest(back then) 3D rendering program

vs

3GHz P4 running the latest(current) 3D rendering program



Theres not really that much that has changed with 3D software. The more powerfull computers now allow more complex designs to be rendered a lot faster then back in the day...

That's what I was thinking about. One of my friends had a copy of Key 3D (CAD), and he said it took hours to render what looked like shaded wireframe models that my then-smoking 166mhz Pentium could render in seconds. Now, it still takes hours to raytrace an image. Sure, it looks better now, but it still takes hours.

[Silent Bob]

Originally posted by jetblackz
Speed isn't the direction CPU chips are going. Hyper-threading is. Weird name, if you ask me. Multi-threading is more like it. The CPU does 2 threads at the same time, to be really multi-tasking(your regular CPU don't do that. It's just a programming technique behind the scene.).

Hyper-threading is just Intels name for it. It makes sense though, there are function units doing nothing at every instruction cycle, you get a tidy increase in throughput if you can keep utilisation of every function unit as high as possible (this can be a nightmare in terms of instruction ordering, predictive branching and so on, but they've obviously climbed those hurdles...)

[Can O' Beans]

Depending on the application being run, newer PCs can "appear" to be as slow as the PCs from years back.

The main difference is the quality/complexity/size/etc.. of whats being processed today.

Try making a movie equal to "Final Fantasy" on PCs from 10 years ago. It could probably be made to work, but the amount of time to reach finished product would be ludicrous.

[Stween]

Originally posted by mrBen
Computers have got faster, but applications have got slower and more bloated, thus negating the change in some cases.

This is it exactly. Back in the day when I was using my Atari ST, software would take a while to load off floppy. Once I got my hard drive for it, things were pretty damn quick. When I dabbled in ST emulators on my 1GHz Athlon, the applications were blindingly fast (and I'm talking about desktop publishing stuff here - the stuff I was using was as pretty impressive software for a 16bit 8MHz machine, let alone a machine hunfreds of times faster).

Given the constraints of the older systems, programmers are forced to find better ways of doing things, that's probably why the software I was using was pretty speedy on a stock ST. With the added speed, memory and drive capacity of newer systems, programmers can be lazier, and add extra fluff that doesn't really alter the functionality of the program itself :) (I should know - when I'm coding in C/Java on a modern desktop system, I won't think for a second about the actual efficiency of the code. When I was coding C/assembly for MC6808 microcontrollers, everyt clock cycle counted, and the timings of instructions counted even more).

Idea: Software should be developed on a platform roughly half as powerful as the system it is intended for :)

[Lorithar]

Perhaps an even better comparison would be to take baseline code for something,
port the code to the relevant *modern* compilers for each system .. .then power them up, load the code and run ..

I'd suspect that it might just show more where the problems lay in modern software..... *grin*

[sasKuatch]

I don't get it. I run Quake2 on my 166mhz 48mb RAM system with Voodoo2, and I get roughly 30 - 40 FPS.

Run the same game on my 800mhz 256mb RAM system with Rage 128, and it's the same or slightly faster.

Oh, it's the video card, you say. Well, then why does it run the same in software mode?:confused:

[Timothy L. Miller]

Faster. My Athlon 2700+ runs at 2,167 MHz, while 5 years ago, my Pentium 233 ran at 233 MHz. That's almost 10x the speed. Most definitely faster.