Story: Progress without parallel

Posted by: Brian Catt (Tuesday 20 June 2006, 11:33 AM)

If you need to go blisteringly fast for the majority of applications that are not pararllel but are specialised, just take the code written to run on the limited resources of the early PCs and run it on the modern hardware which is largly consumed today by inneficient bloatware OS and applications, writen lazilly by high level language programmers using the capacity to disguise their inneficiencies and sloppy software in the greed driven rush to market.

Programs like spreadsheetand WP are not faster in general tha MacWrite and Visicalc, or WANG and FCS before that, they just have GUIs and lots of functionality we don't need most of the time.

POINT? KISS is fast.

Something that ran in a reasonable time under DOS on sub 100 MHz 8 bit CPUs with 640K of RAM and 8 inch floppy drives would go pretty fast recompiled for a 32 bit 2.5 GHz modern PC - about 100 times faster given the CPU can be serviced fast enough by buffers and busses. No parallelism required, just good old Von Neumann.

But then I stated out in process control with 1MB of Core, a 1Mbyte hard drive and paper tape input, so even that looks like Luxury to me. Tell that to the kids today and they wouldn't believe you!