Paul Boddie wrote: > Steve Holden wrote: > >>Even embedded systems are much larger now than the minicomputers of >>yesteryear. Everything's relative. Just wait three years! > > > Had you placed such a bet in 2000, you'd have cleaned up at the > "Moore's Law Casino", but there are various factors at work now which > complicate the once-inevitable trends of hardware performance and the > corresponding advice to people wishing to speed up or slim down their > software: the flattening out of the CPU frequency curve and the > tendency of CPU manufacturers to choose multiple core strategies are > two things which prevent applications from speeding up all by > themselves; whilst storage density is still increasing, as far as I > know, I'd imagine other strategies being adopted in system architecture > which could make performance tradeoffs more pronounced in accessing all > that storage. > > In other words, expect many more threads about global interpreter locks > in the coming three years than we've seen in the last three or even six > years. ;-) > I seem to remember blogging about this a while ago, or perhaps just ranting at c.l.py ... anyway, bottom line is that most people have more than adequate power for their current needs in a present-day single-processor computer.
Expect also to see computational methods focus more on memory-intensive techniques impractical in the past. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com PyCon TX 2006 www.pycon.org -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
