COMPUTER SPEED GAINS ERASED BY MODERN SOFTWARE

[usonian]

https://hackaday.com/2023/07/02/computer-speed-gains-erased-by-modern-software/
by: Bryan Cockfield
July 2, 2023
"ONLY" 228 comments

Why am I chortling?
Because this has been true since the 1980's!
IMNSHO, of course.
We used to say "Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away"

[Julio] has an older computer sitting on a desk, and recorded a quick video with it showing how fast this computer can do seemingly simple things, like open default Windows applications including the command prompt and Notepad. Compared to his modern laptop, which seems to struggle with even these basic tasks despite its impressive modern hardware, the antique machine seems like a speed demon. His videos set off a huge debate about why it seems that modern personal computers often appear slower than machines of the past.

After going through plenty of plausible scenarios for what is causing the slowdown, [Julio] seems to settle on a nuanced point regarding abstraction. Plenty of application developers are attempting to minimize the amount of development time for their programs while maximizing the number of platforms they run on, which often involves using a compatibility layer, which abstracts the software away from the hardware and increases the overhead needed to run programs. Things like this are possible thanks to the amount of computing power of modern machines, but not without a slight cost of higher latency. For applications developed natively, the response times would be expected to be quite good, but fewer applications are developed natively now including things that might seem like they otherwise would be. Notepad, for example, is now based on UWP.

While there are plenty of plausible reasons for these slowdowns in apparent speed, it’s likely a combination of many things; death by a thousand cuts. Desktop applications built with a browser compatibility layer, software companies who are reducing their own costs by perhaps not abiding by best programming practices or simply taking advantage of modern computing power to reduce their costs, and of course the fact that modern software often needs more hardware resources to run safely and securely than equivalents from the past.

[The Magistrate]

1. Sounds Like An Application Of Parkinson's Law

"Work expands to meet the time available for its completion."

[usonian]

4. You made me look it up. 😂

Seems to be Wirth's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, a computer scientist who discussed it in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software".[1][2]

History
Wirth attributed the saying to Martin Reiser, who in the preface to his book on the Oberon System wrote: "The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure all software ills. However, a critical observer may observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in size and sluggishness."[3] Other observers had noted this for some time before; indeed, the trend was becoming obvious as early as 1987.[4]

He states two contributing factors to the acceptance of ever-growing software as: "rapidly growing hardware performance" and "customers' ignorance of features that are essential versus nice-to-have".[1] Enhanced user convenience and functionality supposedly justify the increased size of software, but Wirth argues that people are increasingly misinterpreting complexity as sophistication, that "these details are cute but not essential, and they have a hidden cost".[1] As a result, he calls for the creation of "leaner" software and pioneered the development of Oberon, a software system developed between 1986 and 1989 based on nothing but hardware. Its primary goal was to show that software can be developed with a fraction of the memory capacity and processor power usually required, without sacrificing flexibility, functionality, or user convenience.[1]

Other names
The law was restated in 2009 and attributed to Google co-founder Larry Page. It has been referred to as Page's law.[5] The first use of that name is attributed to fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the 2009 Google I/O Conference.[6]

Other common forms use the names of the leading hardware and software companies of the 1990s, Intel and Microsoft, or their CEOs, Andy Grove and Bill Gates, for example "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away"[7] and Andy and Bill's law: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away".[8]

Gates's law ("The speed of software halves every 18 months"[9]) is an anonymously coined variant on Wirth's law, its name referencing Bill Gates,[9] co-founder of Microsoft. It is an observation that the speed of commercial software generally slows by 50% every 18 months, thereby negating all the benefits of Moore's law. This could occur for a variety of reasons: feature creep, code cruft, developer laziness, lack of funding, forced updates, forced porting (to a newer OS or to support a new technology) or a management turnover whose design philosophy does not coincide with the previous manager.[10]

Hey, my quote!. Great minds think alike. ⚡️

https://www.osnews.com/story/18931/what-intel-giveth-microsoft-taketh-away/
What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away
Submitted by xpnet.com Research STaff 2007-11-15 Benchmarks 83 Comments

“‘What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away’. Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base.

Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007 which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes over 12x as much memory and nearly 3x as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just 7 short years ago (Office 2000). But despite years of real-world experience with both sides of the duopoly, few organizations have taken the time to directly quantify what my colleagues and I at Intel used to call ‘The Great Moore’s Law Compensator’.

[The Magistrate]

6. Thanks, Never Heard Of That One

I do think there's some overlap, if you take increased machine speed as 'more time' and increasingly cumbersome software as 'work expanding to meet time available'.

[Tetrachloride]

2. It would seem to me that the software is deliberately throttled in some ways

[dchill]

3. Bloated software will always expand to the limits ...

... of any technology.

[moniss]

5. Back in the late '90's and

early 2000's I used to read articles by Steve Gibson and other independent software developers who talked about how needlessly clumsy, bloated and inefficient software in general was becoming. Much of it seemed to revolve around whether people were writing their own code or just copying other code and more or less hammering it together for their "new wrinkle" and to make it work. I guess where they were coming from was that you can end up with programming that is needlessly bloated with things that have nothing to do with what you need for your "app" so to speak but the stuff is still consuming resources and interacting.

Good Lord just look at the size of the current Windows package versus XP for example. Yes I know about all of the changes but for a vast majority of computer users who are just browsing and using an occasional productivity program Windows 95 or XP was more than sufficient. Now we have the equivalent of gargantuan capability and consumption of resources even though most people are not using what's there.

It's somewhat similar to when I see people buying four wheel drive vehicles with high horsepower and torque when all of their driving is going to be on paved city streets in Miami. You get some car dealers who won't even stock a 2wd version any longer although it can be ordered. I read an article some years ago that surveyed purchasers of 4wd vehicles and asked them about their use of the feature and only a tiny fraction had used the feature even after 3 years or so of ownership.

So Microsoft is still mostly calling the tune and we end up paying gobs of money for gobs of capability that most of us will never need or use.

[usonian]

7. If it meets your needs, there are really small Linux distros that run fine on limited hardware.

Understand that many aren't interested. My brother, the least savvy computer user, got fed up with windows updates breaking his drivers, which had to be reloaded every time. So he is happy with Ubuntu running on (and supported by Dell).

Autocorrect typed Linux bistros for me.

[SalamanderSleeps]

8. My favorite Bistro is Zorin.

Super fast and with a little tinkering I was able to get my copy of Word and my copy of Adobe CS to run perfectly. Plus, Zorin doesn't call home all of time for updates.

[moniss]

9. I've got some old

legacy programs that I liked to use for things like scanning etc. and they aren't very compatible anymore. So some of the old is over on a multiple OS deal. Yes I'm surprised the spell checker didn't insist on Linus or Lynx.