
A Conversation with Alan Kay - MaysonL
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
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Hexstream
"Just as an aside, to give you an interesting benchmark—on roughly the same
system [(compared to the original Burroughs B5000)], roughly optimized the
same way, a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today.
Moore’s law has given us somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 times improvement
in that time. So there’s approximately a factor of 1,000 in efficiency that
has been lost by bad CPU architectures.

The myth that it doesn’t matter what your processor architecture is—that
Moore’s law will take care of you—is totally false."

Wow. Really?! I'd be interested in knowing the specifics of what Burroughs did
right.

~~~
silentbicycle
On the other hand, computer hardware has also gotten drastically _cheaper_.
How much did one of those Burroughs B5000 systems cost? Tens of thousands of
dollars? (Hundreds?) I expect that spending that much on modern hardware and
clustering it together would come quite a bit closer to what Moore's law would
suggest.

Not everything can just be made parallel at the drop of a hat, of course, and
the architecture itself is probably partially to blame for the difference, but
there are also other major differences.

~~~
Hexstream
The point is that if modern computers had been based on that architecture,
which was way, way more efficient for execution of high-level languages, today
we'd have perhaps the same speed in GHZ but we could do way more because the
high-level languages wouldn't need to execute at a level so far removed from
machine language.

Worrying about how much those machines costed at the time is like worrying
about how much a GB of ram costed at the time.

~~~
silentbicycle
I agree with your underlying point, I just think that it's a little deceptive
to compare a modern, $750 computer's processor to a $100,000+ mainframe's
without acknowledging that they were also designed with a very different
budget.

I was wondering about how much the processor itself influences things a few
days ago while reading an interview with Charles Moore in which he described
Forth-native processors, but I've done very little with any assembly languages
directly, so it's kind of beyond my ken. (Most of what I know about different
architectures has to do with porting C programs.)

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whughes
Great interview. The page formatting was off, but the interviewer asked some
interesting questions which go beyond the usual contemporary Java/Web
material.

