alt Hacker NewsIt’s crazy how computers still seem to get perceivably slow every few years, given how many instructions can be executed in 1ms. Shameful, even..
What’s that law called about programmers wasting all the compute on abstraction?
Replies
loeg • today at 12:30 AM
Idk man, my computers don't seem to get any slower over time -- no upgrades to any components, either.
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inigyou • yesterday at 8:00 PM
Andy and Bill's Law
There are two aspects to compute performance: latency and throughput.
There has been a ton of work to improve throughput, but that's often come at the cost of latency, because a great technique to improve throughput is batching, to avoid the per-task overhead cost.
We've also added many layers of abstraction.
A seminal example is Dan Luu's "computer latency" table (2017) https://danluu.com/input-lag/, which measures the time between a keypress and visible changes on the screen, and wherein an Apple IIe has latency 5x lower than a Lenovo X1 Carbon on Windows.
From some perspective, you could say that the Lenovo on Windows example is an impressive feat of engineering, considering all the subsystems involved (USB, interrupt dispatcher, input layer, windowing system, double-buffering...)
This throughput-over-latency tradeoff can be seen across the entire computer landscape design.