On C/C++ undefined behaviours (there is no "Eclipse")

Russel Winder russel at russel.org.uk
Sun Oct 3 02:21:11 PDT 2010


On Sat, 2010-10-02 at 21:21 +0200, Don wrote:
> retard wrote:
[ . . . ]
> > I meant that computers become more efficient. I've upgraded my system two 
> > times since this discussion last appeared here. If you wait 18 months, the 
> > 20 seconds becomes 10 seconds, in 36 months 5 seconds. It's the Moore's 
> > law, you know.
> 
> Sadly, software seems to be bloating at a rate which is faster than 
> Moore's law. Part of my original post noted that it was much slower than 
> my old 1MHz Commodore 64 took to boot my development environment from a 
> cassette tape! So I still take it as a good sign that the rate of 
> bloating is slower than Moore's law.

Faster processor speeds in the period 1950--2005 was not actually
anything to do with Moore's Law per se -- Moore's Law was about the
number of transistors per chip, not the speed of operation of those
transistors.

Since around 2005 processor speeds have stopped increasing due to
inability to deal with the heat generation.  Instead Moore's Law (which
for the moment still applies) is leading to more and more cores per chip
all running at the same speed as previously -- around 2GHz.

So the ability to improve performance of code by just waiting and buying
new kit is over -- at least for now.  If you do not turn your serial
code into parallel code there will be no mechanism for improving
performance of that code.  A bit sad for inherently serial algorithms.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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