On Fri, Jun 16, 2023 at 02:43:06AM -0500, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote: > I don't think Gates ever actually said this - but that's just based on my > own examination into this from a few years back. > > But, over the years I've done some thread programming, and I was once > solving a problem by loading a lot of data into main memory (like 8-16GB of > data to process as one huge chunk, on a system that only had 32GB total). > > A while later, I had a thought that actually maybe this quote has some > merit. Maybe not the specific amount (of 640KB) - but the general notion > that there is rarely a reason for a single application to consume the > entirety of main memory. It may be better, especially with threads or > multi-core, to work a problem in smaller chunks -- specifically, to work a > problem in chunks smaller than the CPU cache. And in fact, I found a huge > jump in my programs performance when I kept the buffers exactly 1 byte less > than the CPU cache (at the time that was 1MB) - as soon as I went 1 byte > over, I noticed a huge (~3X) hit in performance. Now that's just a single > data point, and the old advise of "never optimize your program for [...]
If you want to know about max possible speedup, try to run memtest - it requires booting into the mem testing procedure. Numbers are impressive, even if the best ones are for smallest (L1) caches. > Anyhow, years ago I recall coming across a quote or an article where Gates > stated the IBM PC (or maybe the 8088 cpu itself) was designed or intended > to only "last" about 10 years. Not that the system components itself would > only last that long, but as it being a "useful" system. In that context, > maybe he was right (if he had said it) - 640K was maybe "enough for anyone" [...] For those who would like more of BG sayings, here you are: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates There you have it, 640KB (he denies) and 6-10 years is somewhere there, too... And some more. I guess we are all prisoners of our own mental frame. I recall that Ken Olsen (DEC founder), once quipped "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." - that was in 1977, according to wikiquote: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Olsen This claim surprised me a bit. He denied himself a hell of lucrative future market. OTOH, he was born in 1926 (BillG in 1955) - back then a phone was still a luxury... An idea that everybody could have their own phone with unique number sounded like total bollocks, I suppose (also: do we have enough women to work at the switchboard). The idea that one could have something in place of radio broadcasting (but similar in function) which would have been tailored to each one's individual gusto? Ha... Then we have folks in DRI, who were surprised when, after releasing their latest CP/M (the one capable of multiuser/multitasking, cannot dig the exact version or quote source), they found out user used those capabilities to run few programs at once (on two terminals side by side) rather than for server-multiuser thingy. Their surprise surprised me, as I quickly learned to annex neighboring vt52 (I can only guess, vt52, but made in Poland, by Mera-Elzab - looked like this one: https://www.elzab.com.pl/images/historia/8%20Mera7953.jpg ) and have edt in one and compiler errors in another - it took me only few days of doing my small assignment on university VAX. Seeing how people make this kind of omissions, I am nowadays tempted to think they were not really using their own products, or at least not too hard. Did not challenge themselves as users. BG, while I am not at all his fan... well, not too much, on the one hand he sold quite a shitty tech and became disgustingly rich from it (and this very fact could be a one-line summary of what humanity is), on the other hand, let's imagine Linux won and all those clueless people call me in the middle of the night, shit, how do I run emacs, I barked a dog at it and computer still not running. Anyway, as much as I am not a fan, I think BG was quite competent. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
