Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!LLL-CRG.LLNL.GOV!bowles
From: bowles@LLL-CRG.LLNL.GOV (Jeff Bowles)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: What to do with all those MIPS
Message-ID: <8804191539.AA00968@lll-crg.llnl.gov>
Date: 19 Apr 88 15:39:34 GMT
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Organization: The Internet
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I remember seeing a video in 1985 of the lucasfilms graphics machine
that had so many cycles to spare that its cursor was a buzzing bumblebee.
How much did it take to do that? A fair amount of CPU, especially measured
by what you were used to five years ago.

I keep gauging current memory (10M wasn't uncommon 3-5 years ago on most
VAX-size systems, and 2-4 years ago smart terminals would be delivered with
0.5-2M, and now we're talking about 100M and in some cases, gigabyte memory
on machines) and comparing to the 3/4M we had on the 11/70 back home. There
are those of you who think THAT is a big number, and remember the 1130 days
when 8K or 32K was a big deal. (I may be off in the numbers - the 11/70 was
my first pseudo-real experience with this sort of thing.)

I wonder what's wasteful and what's not. Certainly, if you use the amount
of memory/MIPS/disk to keep you from having to THINK about a problem, you've
become wasteful - several examples follow:
1) Why houseclean and remove/archive unused files if there's loads of disk
   space?
2) Why not use the simplest sorting algorithms all the time, if CPU is easy
   to come by?
3) Why use your language's equivalent to "packed array of..." when you have
   lots of memory?

Many portability arguments come up as answers to these sorts of things - just
because you have it cushy doesn't mean everyone who receives copies of your
software will have it as nice. Also, more memory/disk/MIPS enable you to get
farther into a problem, as opposed to solving it faster (sometimes) - I believ
that Tom Duff quotes a law about graphics, that generating high-res images
will take N seconds, and if you double the speed of the CPU, it'll still take
N seconds - because you're now interested in generating more complex images,
not twice as many of the older images.

	Jeff Bowles