What Applications Will Drive System Performance? 106
Foredecker asks: "Companies like AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, ATI and others are continuing to drive silicon performance to new levels. Of course, every day computing (basic web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, personal finance, and the like) don't require a Intel 3.2Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading or a AMD Athlon 64 FX and their associated platforms. Of course, there are apps that will leverage today's high performance platforms. Games are an obvious category, as is video editing. I'm looking for apps that will be widely adopted and will drive volume hardware shipments. Things that come to mind are: effective, speaker independent voice recognition, accurate repeatable object recognition in digital photos and videos (or from live feeds such as web cams). What other application categories are there that will drive the need for bigger-faster-better hardware platforms?"
Current demand isn't abating any time soon. (Score:3, Funny)
I mean, what the hell? This isn't the first time I've seen this kind of thing. Why are the guys who are hired to pinch pennies in corporate always the ones who aren't happy until their toilets flush with freshly imported springwater?
OS Bloat (Score:2, Interesting)
Processing speed at either end of the bell curve (Score:5, Insightful)
Things measured in units per second (ie, frames per second, transactions per second, connections per second) will always benefit by faster performance on a faster machine.
Things measured in many 10's of minutes (ie, an hour or more to process one transaction) will also benefit from a faster box. This would be cryptography, video compression codecs, and physics models.
When the transaction time is more than 1 minute but less than 10 minutes you really do not gain anything by increasing the performance of the machine (unless you can increase it to the point it runs in less than a minute. If you compile code on a computer that takes 7 minutes to compile it, buying a new computer that is twice as fast still has you compiling for 4 minutes. No real difference between the two, really, from a user's perspective.
When the transactions are measured in per second, the difference between 15fps and 30fps is the difference between unusable, and usable - particularly when we are talking about first person shooters. The difference between processing 150 visitors a second and 300 visitors a second is the difference between getting slashdotted and not.
When the transactions are measured in hours, being able to double the performance makes the difference in whether or not a particular transaction is even possible. Nightly backups are not particularly effective if they take 28 hours to process. Nightly runs of an accounting system
As long as we have applications that take more than an hour to run, and as long as we are measuring applications in X per second (frames per second in the range of 1 to 100, transactions per second of more than 1,000 and less than 50,000) - we will benefit by having faster computers.
Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv (Score:5, Interesting)
Any difference is performance that requires a stopwatch or a special timing demo application to measure - isn't a difference.
183fps = 200fps in Quake.
pc3200 RAM = pc2700 RAM = pc3500 RAM
28fps in UT2003 = 30fps in UT2003
specINT 93158 = specINT 96452
Pentium4 3.06GHz = Pentium4 3.2GHz = Pentium4 2.8GHz.
Until you are talking about performance games of roughly 300%, or one machine being 3x as fast as another machine - it isn't worth replacing the machine. It would be silly to replace a 486DX2-50 with a 486DX2-66, even though you would get a 30% boost in processor speed. You wouldn't replace a PII/300 with a PII/366 even though you would get a 20% boost in processing speed - they are effectively the same speed and you probably wouldn't notice the difference. Replace that PII/300 with a PIII/900 though, go 3x as fast, and all of a sudden you can see big differences and a major improvement. Same thing with replacing the PIII/900 with a P4/2.8GHz.
Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv (Score:2)
That's only true if you are talking about games. If you're talking about video encoding, or simulation work, or other real number-crunching stuff, then an increase of 50% might see your run times cut from 24 hours to 18 hours. That may well be worth the money, depending on how often you're performing those runs.
That said, you appear to be talking specifi
Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv (Score:2)
Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv (Score:1)
As for "What Applications Will Drive System Performance?"...
I'd say 2003 software suites for the latest notebooks requiring
2005 mobile hardware to run like 2001 desktop systems!
Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv (Score:2)
You can convert between units per second and seconds per unit using this special formula:
1 / unitspersecond = secondsperunit
I hope this helps.
Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv (Score:1)
Re:Processing speed at either end of the bell curv (Score:2)
If units are the inverse of each other, measurements on those units are the inverse of each other.
Windows? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Windows? (Score:3, Funny)
I can't run Gnome (Score:1, Funny)
High end (Score:2)
Distributed computing
Power to scale (1u capable of what only a current 2u can do)
Science
Encryption (Quantum, brute force cracking, etc.)
Databases (often overlooked)
Doom 3
As in all things.... (Score:2, Funny)
Massive amounts of storage, and fantastic amounts of cheap processing power will lead to a generation of smart capable web spiders capable of autonimously downloading and indexing porn while avoiding banners, advertisments, pop ups, P2P spam or crap-floods and duplicates.
The unibiquitious nature of regular porn will make it tame and uninteresting through sheer availability. This will lead a secret cabal of Japanese scientists (and school girls) to create ultra-porn which will require co
Re:As in all things.... (Score:2, Funny)
.NET and DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
Similarly, the applications running in curtained memory are going to stack up at an alarming rate once Longhorn and other platforms start to see pervasive digital rights management. As every bit of data being generated or passed from application to application is being tested against dozens of different filters, CPU time is going to go up in smoke, and it will be illegal to stop these activities from taking place in most countries.
Re:.NET and DRM (Score:2)
a) How much of an edge are we losing as we evolve software and hardware? Is bloat and inefficiency cancelling out CPU performance increase? Or are we making net gains?
Thought: We are making net gains, so the worry is really about efficiency. But we still seem to be inside the 80/20 criteria i.e. the extra effort to increase the efficiency of software is offset by the relatively small perfor
Re:.NET and DRM (Score:1)
I suspect that the hurdles for OSS to avoid DRM will be legislative, not technical. I seem to remember that one senator already has pushed to enact a law that no computer without DRM be allowed to connect to the internet past some date -- take that wit
The same apps that have always driven performance (Score:4, Funny)
And pr0n games.
All technology is driven by 3 things.... (Score:2)
Those are the early adoptors of nearly all technology, and drive the prices to points where normal financially sane people can afford them. Half of all technology every invented was driving by one of those three groups.
For me personally, I use my desktop for lots, and lots of compiling. I'd like my desktop to be more responsive under heavy I/O load. I'd like it to do more things in the background. Personally, I've probably got enough CPU for my desktop. I found fin
Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I wish I knew where this idea came from so I could debunk it properly. The
military I'll grant; war has always been a driving force of technology. The
other two I question. Games are driving new technology now, and have been
for thirty years or so, but historically that's a blip on the radar.
I would propose a different three things (well, two of them different): war,
communications, and entertainment. (If you like, you can group porn and games
under the umbrella of e
Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... (Score:1)
print the Bible. (This is at least partly true.) They would also point to the
crusades as a major cause of the development of a lot of technology in Europe.
I personally disagree with this assessment, though it has some validity.
However, I believe that the Bible wasn't the *only* thing Gutenberg wanted to
print. He printed it first because it was the best-known and most-revered book,
but he wanted to print books in general, not _o
Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... (Score:2)
Lots of early movies we're in fact pornographic. A lot of early money in the film industry was made of pornographic movies. I'd cite it, but I learned that on the "History Channel".
VHS tapes... Know what drove down the prices on VHS players and tapes? Pornography.
Who are the early adaptors on DVD's? Pornographers.
Who drives highend video quality on like HDTV? Uhh, yep, that's them Po
Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... (Score:2)
Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... (Score:2)
Kirby
Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... (Score:2)
Music videos are cool on DVD because its currently the only mainstream way to deliver 5.1 surround sound. The video is pretty much incidental.
Re:All technology is driven by 3 things.... (Score:2)
Compiling will certainly soak your I/O channels which is why ramdisks are so useful. The downside to using a ramdisk to eliminate i/o as a bottleneck is it puts the cpu front and center as your bottleneck.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:VR porn (Score:2)
"It's an 88 Magnum. It shoots through schools."
http://www.fredcorp.com/vortex/reviews/j/jdange
MS Office (Score:2, Funny)
IDE, Bus speed (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to see some typical performance on these types of activities, things that can "pause" a system for a couple seconds.
Loading websites with tons of thumbnails, searching hardrives with/without indexes (search pauses explorer). Programs that can Spike the CPU, use up all the buffer on a device, peg out virtual memory, freezes programs so you cant switch between them.
More multitasking benchmarks with responsiveness being goal. All benchmarks I see are geared around 1 app, how fast can you go, not how smooth can it go. This is why everyone is so interested in Linux kernel 2.4 MM patches or 2.6 low latency patches, to make the system smooth and responsive. People notice these "lags" in windows and linux.
Re:IDE, Bus speed (Score:4, Informative)
Just be glad you don't use an OS w/ hooks into BIOS routines for peripher access!
Re:IDE, Bus speed (Score:2)
Seems one of the most important areas, seems to be left out.
Re:IDE, Bus speed (Score:2)
I can bring a MySQL server to its knees on a PC server, and remote shell to the box is impossible. On an old SPARC Ultra 80, ssh into the box isn't FAST, but it is possible for remote management.
Re:IDE, Bus speed (Score:2)
I've had similar issues with very slow ssh on old Sun hardware - much slower than similar speed PC hardware, and I suspect that it's the lack of a good random number generator.
I haven't done any real analysis though, because I don't need to ssh in often enough to care.
Multiple PCI (Score:2)
I know this cost a lot of $ in those days, but couldn't this be done a lot cheaper now by having multiple busses?
Re:IDE, Bus speed (Score:2)
Martin Tilsted
Re:IDE, Bus speed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:IDE, Bus speed (Score:2)
Re:IDE, Bus speed (Score:1)
What OS are you using? I just formatted a floppy today on a Mandrake 9.1 system and there was no impact to any other processes. Ditto for inserting a CD.
Surviving a Slashdotting (Score:2)
Re:Surviving a Slashdotting (Score:1)
Re:Surviving a Slashdotting (Score:1)
--
lds
Animated paperclips (Score:5, Funny)
Amateur filmmaking (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now CGI is still expensive enough that most independents and hobbyists don't include it in their films. Affordable, rapid CGI could be a possible killer-ap for high-performance hardware. Currently, professional moviemakers must agonize over the creation of any CGI effect. It's a tedious process that involves using wire-frame animation, rendering and so on. If this process could be speeded up and simplifed, it might encourage more widespread adoption of CGI effects among hobbyists, giving them the ability to make movies they never could have before with their limited budgets.
Imagine being able to 'direct' a VR character almost as easily as you would direct a real life actor. When the technology gets to that level, we could see an explosion of new movies by people outside the Hollywood cookie cutter. Filmmakers with radicially new ideas who are too young to have developed a 'rep' in Hollywood could be creating some very professional looking films. Think of it this way: right now there are lots of people who write fanfics of their favorite movies or TV shows. But actually creating an episode of Star Trek, for example, is just not possible right now. With improved technology, perhaps these creative individuals might very well be able to make their own episodes, largely using CGI. Imagine taking a sci-fi movie that you like for the most part but hated the ending of. You load your CGI software with images of the main characters and battleships from the DVD and create CGI models of them. Now you can create a new ending that's more to your liking. Better yet, you can burn the new version of the movie with your ending (forget the "Director's Cut", this is "Mike's Cut") onto DVD and trade with your friends.
Right now we are all still pretty much at the mercy of Hollywood to make films that we like. Very soon, the balance of power will shift and creative individuals who have lots of ideas but budgets nowhere near those of studios will be able to create some very impressive looking films. And then Hollywood will have to get their ass in gear and show us something that we couldn't do ourselves in our own living room.
GMD
P.S.: Several people have mentioned that pornography has historically been a big driver of technology. Can you imagine that boom that the adult market will get when people can make their own adult films using CGI characters? Think plots of porn flicks are stupid? Wish for something better? Hell, just load your CGI software with images of Jenna Jameson and make your own film with her as the star.
Re:Amateur filmmaking (Score:2, Informative)
You might want to reconsider that ;-)
Fan-Made Star Trek Episode Available for Download [slashdot.org]
Starship Exeter [mac.com]
'Star Trek' reborn in online episode [twincities.com]
Re:Amateur filmmaking (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Amateur filmmaking (Score:2)
While I won't defend the "quality" of most of Hollywood's mainstream products, I must say you ha
Lazy coding (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, maybe not bubblesort. But non-optimal algorithms, slow languages, and copying memory instead of passing a reference/pointer will increase.
That's not even a totally awful thing, because it means that the performance of already efficient applicatoins/languages/coders goes up as well. It also means that it's easier to start writing code without mastering TAOCP first.
So encourage your friends to write game engines in perl.
Inefficient or unintelligent coding (Score:3, Funny)
Theoretically, code gets bigger as the interface gets easier (practically, it seems to just get bigger no matter the interface). As the coding interface is progressively automated, the code can theoretically get progressively larger.
Vision: in 10 years Google has given rise to Hackle, where you can write a simple request for any program and have it ready to download in 5 seconds. But the result is Huge.
Yow - I've got to
Maximally pessimal sort (Score:2)
(The paper is fun if you know computer science, the c2.com link is in "normal English". Try the paper if you think you'd enjoy it; it has a dry wit and pursues its task of sorting as slowly as possible with great gusto.)
Re:Lazy coding (Score:1)
Java
It's about shifting complexity (Score:2)
So, we wind up with, say, an app using Swing running on AWT, running on Java in a JVM running on Windows, running on a bunch of DLL's running in a C++ runtime (compiled to assembly), on a BIOS, on a RISC x86 emulator, which runs on microcode eventually, all so we can have a IM app with tons of features.
Now, could somebody implement all that in straight assembl
One word: movies (Score:2)
Here's one. (Score:1)
I can think of a few others, but this one is the most fun.
Video editong (Score:2)
If Apple has any brains they would be busy porting their multimedia software to run on a full 64-bit version of OS X.
Another application that could always use more performance is finite element analysis - but that's more of niche than video editing.
Re:If Apple had any brains (Score:2)
Actually, I did like that Apple floppy drives ejected their disks automatically, and that they recognized new disks. That's IT.
Business Prospective (Score:2, Interesting)
calculation intensive programs... (Score:2)
I know that the leasing package that I work on would gladly take advantage of this. Not just our end of period stuff, but also our interactive stuff. In fact this new hardware is making for great servers these days and replacing much of the old HP / Sun servers.
What Applications Will Drive System Performance? (Score:1)
W*nd*ws,
Home entertainment platform format PC's,
De-fragging 500 Gb HDD's,
Decision making s/w for window lickers,
Cybersex suits - (plenty of scope for worms and virusses there),
3-D holographic projection displays,
Biofeedback or retina controlled MMI, (Man Machine Interface),
Replicator units,
Application startup (Score:3, Informative)
Data Crunching/Visualization (Score:1)
In the pharmaceutical world, for most scientists, there isn't near enough computing power for what they would like to do on a daily basis. Grid computing is making major inroads because of that. Still day to day work could make better use of things, if it didn't take 1hr to get the picture
Consumer Application For More Power? (Score:5, Insightful)
A good example would be Palm-type devices. As big-processor speed increases, there is also an increase in small-processor speed and efficiency (limited more by heat than anything else). This has given people a smaller, more powerful Palm-type device today than they could have bought five years ago. Another example is the DVR/PVR. The new two-tuner satellite HDTV receiver/recorders can handle the receipt and recording of two high-definition streams while decoding and playing back a third - my ancient Showstopper (ReplayTV), on the other hand, starts to chug when encoding/saving an NTSC transmission (at highest quality) while watching another (I paid &700 for my 20-GB Showstopper back "in the day" while the new 250-GB HDTV units will go for $1,000 and come down from there).
It will be interesting to see how long non-PC devices take to catch up to current top PC speeds and what applications (especially portable, non-notebook apps) spring from that.
AI combined with Databases or search (Score:4, Interesting)
I recall seeing an algorithm that partially ignored traditional dictionary-type translations and relied more on a relational database. For example, rather than work word by word through a given sentence, it attempted to relate that sentence to other sentences and solve in that matter. If it sounds confusing, it's mostly because I read about it quite a while back, and really can't recall most of the details. A sentence such as "Comment Allez-Vous?" would literally translate as "how are you going", or something to that effect (Allez is the second-person plural of 'to go' in French), but is obviously more colloquially translated as "How's it going?" Rather than concern itself with the meanings of the individual words, this algorithm would know the meaning of that phrase and use it as sort-of guidelines for how an unkown phrase would translate. And I'm sure doing that properly, in realtime, with no errors would require a ludicrous amount of processor power and be ridiculously useful. Go ahead an couple that with the above-mentioned truly accurate voice recognition and you've got the legitimate workings of a device most would consider to be science fiction.
CASE tools and re-engineering tools (Score:1)
In the Future ... (Score:2)
There will be no grammar ...
Foredecker : "Of course, every day computing don't require a Intel 3.2Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading."
"Computing" is an abstract singular noun. "Don't require" is a contraction of "do not require", and "do require" is a plural verb. I assume you were going for "doesn't."
Duuhhh (Score:2)
The G4/G5 is the best chip for RC5, by the way.
Re:Duuhhh (Score:2)
Slashcode should auto-detect those screwups.
neeeeeeed moorrreeee cpuuuu (Score:2)
Gentoo.
(or any from-source system)
I find applications still need a lot more speed too. And it's not just inefficient coding I think. Detecting and removing most of the spam from my mailbox takes my mail filters about 2 minutes a day, seemingly regardless of the mail client I use.
Virus scanners (and possibly other security methods) are still a big slow down. And I can't see things improving on that front.
- Muggins the Mad
Re:neeeeeeed moorrreeee cpuuuu (Score:2)
Virtual Machines! (Score:1)
PC Virtual machine technology has completely changed the way that I design systems.
More power? Bring it on!
Desktop Environments (Score:1, Interesting)
Voice recognition? (Score:2)
The truth is, we dont need it. As impressive as voice recognition sounds, its application is limited to archival and military use.
Next you'll say NVIDIA and AMD will design their systems around Duke Nukem Forever.
It's useful! (Score:1)
I disagree. Though I haven't used it recently, back in the days of MacOS 9, I used Apple's speakable items quite often.
Being able to lay in bed and ask the computer what time it is, if I have new emails, who's currently online, etc. is useful. (being able to control things with X10 even more so)
Retail would be another application where voice recognition may be useful. Cu
weather forecasts (Score:1)
Aliens (Score:2)
Computational Mathematics (Score:2, Interesting)
two things (Score:1)
I wonder what would happen if chip makers stopped making faster chips. How long would it take for most apps to catch up and for people to notice?
Elder Care (Score:2)
Killer movie making app (Score:2)
You'd choose from drop-downs:
Scene: Exterior; City Street; Bad neighborhood; Crowded; Night; Drizzling rain
Actors: #1: 40s Italian American wise guy; #2: 30s African American smart aleck (here, you'd flip through characters and choose associa
Software Defined Radios (Score:2)
Spam filtering (Score:1)
It will be the Turing test of the 21st century.
Raytracing!!! (Score:2)
There will never, NEVER be enough cpu horsepower for raytracing. I will always want (todays highend)^2 power in my boxes. And strangely enough, i dont see my render times coming down at all. (Mmmmmmm... soft shadow precision. Mmmmmm... higher poly radiosity meshes. Mmmmmm... photons. Etc. etc).
CFD (Score:3, Interesting)
short, those people will always buy the fastest PC stuff available, because for them it makes a huge difference whether a solution converges in two or in four days.
Compilers and emulators (Score:1)
what apps drive performance (Score:2, Interesting)
Money...... (Score:2)