Software vs hardware

Discussion in 'Tech Discussion' started by ZhaWarudo, Sep 21, 2017.

  1. Westeller

    Westeller Smokin' Sexy Style!! Staff Member

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    Now do the comparison again, but this time do SSD to RAM disk.
     
  2. lnv

    lnv ✪ Well-Known Hypocrite

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    Ramdisk will destroy it by another 10X, simply due to the direct connection. Though to be fair that comparison looks to be using an SSD on Sata II so it is limited by connector.

    Ramdisk:

    [​IMG]


    If you use NVM connector, you can get some good numbers on SSDs too.

    [​IMG]
     
  3. Needhydra

    Needhydra Everything is on Fire

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    ok light me shed some light here. Multi-threading is both hard to do right and can negatively effect certain work loads. this is due to you cant have two different threads work on the same "object" at the same time.
    An example is billy and bob are both writing a paper together. While they are working together they can not write on the same page at the same tine.

    gpu acceleration works great doing the same operation but asking it to do logic can choke it.
    in lame mans terms gpus can do tons of physics calculations but when you start asking if A bigger than B then do X if not do Y then issues can popup fast.

    Also ghz is a bad measure IPC or instructions per clock is more accurate. this is why intel cpus are faster then amd cpus for years while having a lower max speed. if compare to a car engine ghz is rpm and IPC is horse power.
     
  4. lnv

    lnv ✪ Well-Known Hypocrite

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    Yes, that is correct. But when implemented properly, the performance increases by quite a bit. That said there is plenty of opportunity to improve workload, specifically separated the GUI process from other background processes. You just need to lock when you are working on objects or data that is concurrent. One that can benefit a lot is the browser, hence why FireFox is working on their new Servo engine.


    GPUs tend to be faster at math and rendering, but they have a ton of cores and work in parallel. But each individual core is slow so it would be slower in linear tasks than a CPU.

    Yes you are correct, I simplified it a bit too much there. IPC is what matters. AMD went for more cores instead of IPC but since parallelism didn't come they ended up with processors that perform far poorer than their full potential. Hence why they went back on improving on IPC.

    As you can see by the graph, over 10 years, the improvements in IPC was less than 2X. Core 2 Duo was pretty much the last big IPC jump(it took 8 years just to reach a similar jump % wise), following that only semi-decent was ivybridge to haswell. (Though to be clear, there have been improvements outside of IPC which is what I described)

    [​IMG]
     
  5. Jeebus

    Jeebus Well-Known Member

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    There were a lot of reasons that AMD processors sucked at IPC and were slower than Intel processors with half as many cores. A lot of it stems from the architecture AMD used for its cores. Every two AMD cores was considered a module, and each module shared a lot of on-die resources that Intel included for each core individually. That ended up slowing down a lot of parallel operations on AMD processors that needed to wait for a compute unit to be freed. That's one of the big reasons why the Bulldozer-based AMD processors were trounced by Intel processors for the better part of a decade.
     
  6. Needhydra

    Needhydra Everything is on Fire

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    notice that i said certain workloads can have worse performance with multi-threading not all.

    sending and receiving data tends to be the biggest overhead when using compute shaders and anything pre dx11(windows 7) hardware wise tends to be shit with branching logic but now gpus don't have to bad of a performance hit. i still prefer to do most things on the cpu and only really use the gp for very repetitive tasks such as image processing and generation
     
  7. Wujigege

    Wujigege *Christian*SIMP*Comedian

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    Simple answer : companies are integrating ads into their freeware and other data gathering tools.
    Software companies that did not effectively monetize all went bankrupt.
    Big Data is the new gold mine. And companies are in a Big Data Gold Rush
     
  8. AliceShiki

    AliceShiki 『Ms. Tree』『Magical Girl of Love and Justice』

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    Honestly? I used a 15 years old PC until a month or so ago and it did pretty fine... Oh, and it was an average PC back when it was bought.

    As long as you don't try to play AAA games, an old hardware works just fine, even if the software upgrades... *shrugs*
     
  9. GekkoZockt

    GekkoZockt Well-Known Member

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    What alot of people don't realise is that programs have way more features than they used to have, they look way nicer and got patched so often that some programs contain alot of junkcode.
    The reason we don't see these lightway programs leading the marked is because the demand of features increase with the new hardwares possibilities.

    For example, everybody want's longer battery life for smartphones, right? Well with today's technology it wouldn't be a problem to create a smartphone with a battery lifespan of 1 week but it would never sell. I mean who want's to trade of display resolution, faster internet etc.
     
  10. Truerror

    Truerror Well-Known Member

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    Totally this.

    I have a laptop from 2012 (so about 5 years old now) running Win10. It has no SSD. In this case, the software is way newer than the hardware. It still boots in 30sec or under, even cold boots. Browser (well, most applications, in general) also takes around 5 sec or less. So all in all, my experience is pretty similar to yours. I can't understand why the OP thinks things are slower now. I can still remember the 5 minute long boot time of Win95.

    Most of the time, these receipt softwares are old. They were written back in the day when single core CPUs were the norm, but is still used now. Thus the discrepancy.