I thought this was a particularly interesting nugget:
"""
Just as an aside, to give you an interesting benchmark—on roughly the same system, roughly optimized the same way, a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today. Moore’s law has given us somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 times improvement in that time. So there’s approximately a factor of 1,000 in efficiency that has been lost by bad CPU architectures.
The myth that it doesn’t matter what your processor architecture is—that Moore’s law will take care of you—is totally false.
"""
Processors have also gotten dramatically cheaper. How much computing power can you get with modern hardware if you spend the same amount Xerox PARC would have? That cuts out a good portion of the discrepancy.
I've always wondered about this quote. What, exactly, accounts for the differences here? What is it about that architecture that was so much better than modern architectures?
Comments
Norvig references Alan Kay's "Maxwell's equations of Software": http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
I thought this was a particularly interesting nugget:
""" Just as an aside, to give you an interesting benchmark—on roughly the same system, roughly optimized the same way, a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today. Moore’s law has given us somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 times improvement in that time. So there’s approximately a factor of 1,000 in efficiency that has been lost by bad CPU architectures.
The myth that it doesn’t matter what your processor architecture is—that Moore’s law will take care of you—is totally false. """
Processors have also gotten dramatically cheaper. How much computing power can you get with modern hardware if you spend the same amount Xerox PARC would have? That cuts out a good portion of the discrepancy.
I've always wondered about this quote. What, exactly, accounts for the differences here? What is it about that architecture that was so much better than modern architectures?