#Amiga World Tech Journal
10 messages in this thread
As processors get faster, applications continue to run at "tolerable"
speeds. That's darn near a law of computing. When things get too slow,
someone comes along and re-codes the vital parts in assembler or attacks
the problem in a new way, reducing execution by an order or magnitude. I
know of a large, famous app being ported to Windows; it takes a souped-up
486 nearly 24 hours to rebuild and relink it. The team uses four 486s in
parallel to get a new re-build done overnight. Execution speed was
intolerable six months ago, they tweaked it until it was tolerable, then
stopped tweaking. See what I mean?
God what a disaster! When we used 8080s we would spend 2 hours compiling
assembly to "make" a new system. At least it ran well. I cringe at the
massive pieces of coding disasters that are becoming so common place. Some
day we will all own machines with the power of a CRAY and no doubt they
will all run applications as slowly and clumsy as we see them now. So what
is the thought for the day? No hardware no matter how clever can be made to
look good if enough idiot programs are written and made defacto standards
by the mindless swarming masses. You may quote me.
Wanna play with my PDP8, 4 k of CORE memory> WOW:) The Commissioner
Ack! Phht!!! I saw a PDP11 for sale at the AxeMan for $100 bucks. And if
you really if you really want to uncover "Soul of the new machine" they
have an Eclipse at Acme for the asking (I think). What a box load of junk!
Jay;
It makes a great deal of difference WHICH PKP11 it is.
An Amiga message processed by Whap!,
bill
Oops, that should have been which PDP11 (and not PKP11), fingers just not
up to the task <grin>
An Amiga message processed by Whap!,
bill
You have a PDP8? Wow. Ever think of getting rid of it? I'd love to have
one to play with.
Darin
– via Whap!
Can you give a good definition of "order of magnitude"–in layman's terms.
I have heard it used often, but I am not sure what is meant when someone
uses the term. Thanks.
Al;
"Order of Magnitude:" factor of 10 larger (or smaller). Of course if one
wanted to, I suppose that one "could mean factor of 2" is dealing in binary
<grin>.
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bill
Sure! It's a common phrase meaning "within ten times (or one-tenth)". In
other words, it's a term of comparison, similar to "in the same ballpark."
In my message, I stated that it's often possible to make a program run ten
times faster, by re-coding key routines in assembler. However, the choice
of algorithm for performing a certain task is often more important than
re-coding in a faster "language" like assembly language.