ImperialViolet - Letter to 20 years ago

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2022-07-05 01:30:04

I noticed that I have not posted anything here in 2020! There's a bunch of reasons for this: the work I'm doing at the moment does not lend itself so well to blog posts, and life intervenes, leaving less time for personal projects. But in order to head off the risk that I'll post nothing at all this year I pulled something from one of my notebooks. 2020 is a round number so I decided to do some reflection and this was a letter that I imagined writing to myself 20 years ago. It is very much a letter to me! The topics are going to be quite specific and if you weren't paying attention to the computing industry in the year 2000 I’m not sure how much of it will make sense. But these are the points that I think me of 20 years ago would have wondered about.

You must be thinking that computers will be crazy fast by now. Yes…ish. It's complicated, and that's going to be a theme here. You've been hearing from Intel that the NetBurst chips will hit 10GHz in a few years, so with another few doublings what will have by now? 50GHz? Actually common values are around 3.5GHz. Some reach 5GHz, but only in bursts. Intel never hit 10GHz and nor did anybody else. It’s better than it sounds: instructions per clock are up a lot, so each cycle is worth more. (Although maybe we'll get to some of the issues that caused!) More importantly, all systems are multiprocessor now. It's physically a single chip, but inside is often 8- to 32-way SMT. Yep, that's cool. And yep, it only helps for certain sorts of workloads. Multithreaded programming is not going away.