Why are our supercomputers slow? (Kolivas)
July 25th, 2007 | Published in Progress, Quotes, Technology
We all own computers today that were considered supercomputers 10 years ago. 10 years ago we owned supercomputers of 20 years ago… and so on. So why on earth is everything so slow? If they’re exponentially faster why does it take longer than ever for our computers to start, for the applications to start and so on? Sure, when they get down to the pure number crunching they’re amazing (just encode a video and be amazed). But in everything else they must be unbelievably slower than ever.
Computers of today may be 1,000 times faster than they were a decade ago, yet the things that matter are slower.
The standard argument people give me in response is ‘but they do such more these days it isn’t a fair comparison’. Well, they’re 10 times slower despite being 1,000 times faster, so they must be doing 10,000 times as many things. Clearly the 10,000 times more things they’re doing are all in the wrong place.
–Interview with Con Kolivas, a former Linux kernel developer: “Computing is boring“