Comment by jonathanlydall
2 days ago
Memory in particular is something that I've reflected on more than once as having the most impressive gains in computing since I started paying attention to it (networking/USB too, but that doesn't make your computer "faster" in the same way).
I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid-tier at the time, i.e. very much not a given. As I recall Diablo II recommended 64MB for single player and 128MB for multiplayer (or above 4 players or something).
The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.
Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase, but the metrics on them isn't quite as front and center on PC specs as memory and CPU.
Hard drive capacity similarly impressive as RAM in terms of size (was apparently 10-30GB in 2000), but I don't have a 10TB hard disk as I don't need one that big (1TB is plenty for me), so again it's not as impactful to me as memory.
> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.
Over that time CPUs have also increased their instructions per clock by 3 to 4 times, so the comparison is a bit closer than that. 5Ghz in CPUs is also common these days which would make it even closer. RAM has also improved in more than just total size though.
I completely agree. With everything from Out-Of-Order execution, deep pipelines, SIMD, huge CPU cache, etc... I would be surprised if the performance increase is not considerably more than 1024x.
GPUs are even more extreme. A 5060 is something like 15,000x faster than a 3dfx Voodoo card from ~2000 by my limited research.
It is a funny thing, while yes the task of 'put pixel on screen' is the same. They are so wildly different in how they function, I don't know how to even quantify it. 15,000x may be an understatement.
> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.
This nerd sniped me a bit. Your calculation on the amount of CPU power is too low, because of the change in IPC, but for the things we have benchmarks for, it isn't multiple orders of magnitude off like I expected. Looking at Cinebench 2003, prime95, and a few other benches, I get somewhere between 300x and 850x faster for the modern CPU over the Pentium 3.
For me, the biggest change in performance in my life was going from spinning disks to SSDs. That change felt bigger than any other leap by a long shot.
Yesterday I had to setup a rig for a massive down load that was larger than any spare SSD I had laying around, so I got a 2TB HDD out of an old PVR and turned it into the main drive for an old Optiplex I have.
I had forgotten just how slow spinning disks are. The delay on everything is significant. Even just opening the file manager has a few second delay, Firefox took something like 15+ seconds to load in once it loads all its dependencies, something I haven't had in over a decade now.
You start to wonder if it is loading, you just have to watch the HDD light or listen to the hardware to confirm.
> you just have to watch the HDD light or listen to the hardware to confirm.
When I hit occasional delays - like opening a Windows Start menu or File Explorer - I still find myself straining my ears to hear that, despite no mechanical drives in use...
Now it's all calls to the internet.
> Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase
This was the most impactful upgrade/breakthrough for me. The first time I put even a SATA SSD in my PC at home I was completely blown away. It still blows my mind somewhat the amount of compute I have sitting on my desk though, both in terms of memory and CPU/GPU power, but that move from spinning rust to solid state was huge.
Then Apple did to me again with the M1 launch and NVMe speeds that made swapping nearly imperceptible.
In a way I already knew it to be the case, I always built machines with an excess of RAM since hitting a memory limit and falling back to HDD would crush all performance. But once I got on SSD, it was the big game changer.
Me too. I distinctly remember saying that I would never own a non-solid state boot drive again.
that's only 133-times as much CPU power
akshually, it's also more closer to 500-1,000x. You can't look at clock speed only. Processor architecture makes all the difference. Pipelining, SIMD, memory bandwidth, blablala, everything got way better. Better approximation would be to use something like a synthetic benchmark or just (theoretical) FLOPS of each.
Otherwise, we can say that 6502 at 15Ghz is better than what you have now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859706
> Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid-tier at the time
I like to use Google books to refer to old issues of PC Magazine.
For $1999 in Feburary 1999, you could get the Pentium 450MHz desktop with 128GB of memory.
That said, I could do almost everything I do today on a similar machine back then. Surf the web, admin Linux servers, web development, edit video, play games, Photoshop, IRC, type papers...
https://books.google.com/books?id=mi_RGvUW6eQC&pg=PA108-IA3&...
128MB ram... Your hard disk could be upgraded to 12.8GB of total space for an extra $50.
Also, you get this _sweet_ 8MB nVidia 3d graphics card!
> For $1999 in Feburary 1999, you could get the Pentium 450MHz desktop with 128MB of memory.
Damn capitalism taking us from that to a $699 MacBook Neo.
128MB of memory, not 128GB.
The funny part is that a 1000x increase in RAM somehow doesn't make a modern computer feel 1000x more luxurious
When was the last time you used a vintage computer? I couldn't believe how long people had to wait for the start-up (and shutdown) processes; and there was no hibernation! (Windows 9x/System 7.x). Modern instant-on functionality is 1,000,000 times better than that
When’s the last time you have?
Up until the end of the DOS era computers booted nearly instantly, doubly so if their OS was in ROM.
It was the heavy GUI systems that came around that made boot times quite slow.
There’s not a single modern computer that is ready for input as quickly as an Apple 2...
1 reply →
OTOH, MacOS before preemptive multitasking had incredible UI latency. It felt like the UI responded before you finished clicking the mouse.