patrick.net

It's dead because people have stopped paying $2500 for the latest and greatest.

The doubling of computing power every 18 months is officially dead. CPUs haven't been getting any faster over the past six years.

Uh, no. DESKTOP CPUs have largely stagnated, but server CPUs at the same price point are more than 5x faster than 6 years ago, and mobile CPUs are more than 20x faster than 6 years ago.

Nobody cares about desktop CPU speeds anymore because they don't matter.

By the way, clock speed != "faster". A single 2Ghz Ivy Bridge is more than 10x faster than a 4Ghz pentium 4.

Picture taking abilities aside, today's phones are less capable than a Pentium 486 computer running Windows 3.1.
Now bare in mind, if you took away all of the other processes that were running on Windows 3.1 and you only executed one function apps like run on the smart phones. That windows box would be 5 times faster than an iPhone.

Smartphones just lack the math coprocessor. That is why they will never replace computers that can do practical productivity applications. Not until they include a math coprocessor.

I work on a system that supports up to 4,095 CPU's. HP Nonstop. Of course that was with the old single core chips. Maybe more now with the quad core chips.

CaptainShuddup says

Picture taking abilities aside, today's phones are less capable than a Pentium 486 computer running Windows 3.1.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

CaptainShuddup says

Now bare in mind, if you took away all of the other processes that were running on Windows 3.1 and you only executed one function apps like run on the smart phones.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Please, tell us more about how you believe multi tasking works on modern smartphones.

CaptainShuddup says

That windows box would be 5 times faster than an iPhone.

Yeah, a 16Mhz 486 is outperforming a dual core 800Mhz Cortex A9. Sure. Because people who don't know what they're talking about are experts on this stuff.

CaptainShuddup says

Smartphones just lack the math coprocessor.

Holy fucking shit, now you're just making things up. This isn't 1997.

A single A15 core can do 10 gigaflops at 1.4Ghz. That's approximately half of what the last generation Ivy Bridge desktop CPUs were doing at the same clock speed, but with less than one 20th of the power consumption.

Kevin says

Holy fucking shit, now you're just making things up.

My vote for best comment of the day.

From the Wikipedia page about ARM processor (used in iPhone 4, e.g.)

"VFP (Vector Floating Point) technology is an FPU coprocessor extension to the ARM architecture. It provides low-cost single-precision and double-precision floating-point computation fully compliant with the ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985 Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic. "

The iPhones GPU isn't exactly last century technology, either.

After reading too many web pages yesterday, here's my take. VFP was abandoned after ARM7's but single precision floating point is included in processors with NEON extensions -- that is all Cortex-A8s, but NEON is optional in A9s. I would imagine that even floating point emulation in software on modern ARM processors can keep up with 486's hardware math coprocessors.

My Desktop at home is an 8 year old AMD Athlon XP and it works just fine and still does everything I need it to.

Your smart phone is toy pure and simple, it is a culmination of what the PC has evolved or devolved as it were into. Had Windows 3.1 been as useless as the smart phone, a few people would still be on their Lisa in obscurity playing with their little computer hobby. The PC made them practical and productive.
As the internet grew, some people realized they don't need all of the computing power that was even in a Windows 3.1, they need graphics, sound and connectivity. And that is where we are today with the smart phone, show me a graphics suite, software development, 3D modeling, Office productivity suite for the smart phone, that was even half as robust as Office 6, or Corel Draw, Photo Shop, Auto Cad, Borland C+ or Visual Studio 3, and I'll eat my keyboard letters that spell out...

"I don't know what in the hell I'm talking about"

I mean it's not like Android doesn't freeze just displaying a toast dialog almost monthly.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5103957/why-does-using-float-instead-of-double-not-improve-android-performance

Many, perhaps most, Android devices have no floating-point co-processor.

I am currently working on a rather large, calculation intensive sound analysis tool, which is doing several million multiplications and additions per second.

That's not going to work very well on Android devices lacking a floating-point co-processor.

Move it into C/C++ with the NDK, then limit your targets to ARM7, which has a floating-point co-processor.

Or, change your math to work in fixed-point mode. For example, Google Maps does not deal with decimal degrees for latitude and longitude, but rather microdegrees (10^6 times degrees), specifically so that it can do its calculations using fixed-point math.

http://gamesfromwithin.com/break-that-thumb-for-best-iphone-performance

You know I actually work on these things for a living, right?

The very idea that there was "more computing power" in windows 3.1 than in a modern smartphone is a claim that doesn't even make sense.

Smartphones are simply dumb terminals with smart graphics. They are meant to be I/O devices only. It's just that today I/O requires a lot of processing power for audio, video, graphics, and encryption. However, smart phones are still functionally dumb terminals following the same centralized model that terminals and mainframes used in the 1970s. The only difference is that you can connect to many servers instead of one.

However, as I/O devices go, smart phones are pretty cool.

Dan8267 says

Smartphones are simply dumb terminals with smart graphics. They are meant to be I/O devices only. It's just that today I/O requires a lot of processing power for audio, video, graphics, and encryption. However, smart phones are still functionally dumb terminals following the same centralized model that terminals and mainframes used in the 1970s. The only difference is that you can connect to many servers instead of one.

However, as I/O devices go, smart phones are pretty cool.

I think that's a fair assessment. Our architecture guy says the real action now and at least for the foreseeable future is in eliminating or at least managing the I/O bottleneck. The whole CPU race thing is basically dead due to the widespread availability of virtualization. IBM sort of pioneered that technology during the mainframe days and then brought it one and two steps forward with their pSeries line but now most shops have VMware and that runs on commodity hardware. I haven't done much AIX work for several years now. It's all Red Hat on VMware running on basically disposable hardware.

As for the HP Nonstop line, it was originally Tandem Nonstop and I think Wall Street still uses them. They DO NOT go down but they are also not cheap.

rootvg says

The whole CPU race thing is basically dead due to the widespread availability of virtualization.

To a large extend that's true. However, there are also other factors that have been limiting CPU progress: heat, memory transfer rates, and reaching the limits of miniaturization.

Dan8267 says

Smartphones are simply dumb terminals with smart graphics. They are meant to be I/O devices only. It's just that today I/O requires a lot of processing power for audio, video, graphics, and encryption. However, smart phones are still functionally dumb terminals following the same centralized model that terminals and mainframes used in the 1970s. The only difference is that you can connect to many servers instead of one.

However, as I/O devices go, smart phones are pretty cool.

Smartphones are meant to be I/O devices only? You have to be joking. Network connections on mobile are pathetic, even in good conditions. Mobile is rapidly moving computation back to the client, after nearly a decade of steadily offloading things to the servers in the era of fast home broadband.

You haven't heard of software as a service, have you? Why sell software when you can rent it out for much more profit?

Dan8267 says

You haven't heard of software as a service, have you? Why sell software when you can rent it out for much more profit?

That's...exactly what I'm referring to. Desktop software has been driven to the server for the last decade. Mobile apps are moving that back to the client.

I think Kevin reads to much Infoweekly.
Do you do the surveys too?