[cassette door shuts]
[keys clicking]
[landline phone ringing sound, electronic chords]
Welcome to another episode of The 8-bit Guy
Now before we get started, I wanted to draw your attention to this
beautiful plaque that YouTube sent me
congratulating me on reaching 100,000 subscribers.
Now, actually, it took 'em a while to get me the plaque
because I'm actually nearly hitting 200,000 subscribers now.
And I just wanted to say that when I started the channel
I had no idea that it would ever be this popular, and I have you guys to thank for it
because you guys are what keep me motivated to keep making these.
Recently I did an episode where I explored a 10-year old Core Duo laptop
to see if it was obsolete yet.
Surprisingly I found that it would still handle any modern task
and I so I began to wonder: Has Moore's Law finally come to an end
or has computer progress finally slowed down?
After all, if you look at the last 40 years of computer history, and you do the exact same experiment
you'll see what I'm talking about.
Try going to Year 1990, and look at that computer
versus a computer from 10 years earlier.
They aren't even in the same league.
So I started doing some research and taking a look at various aspects of computers.
I started with memory, and looked at intervals of 5 years starting in 1975.
At this point the typical computer had 1 or 2 kilobytes of RAM.
Five years later that amount increased by a factor of 16
and five years after that increased again by a factor of 16.
Surely this trend of exponential growth could not continue, right?
Well, in order to go forward I'm gonna have to shrink this chart down some.
There, that will give us some more room.
Over the next five years, memory doubled. That's still nowhere near the growth we saw before.
Let's shrink the chart down again, and look at the next year.
This time it quadrupled.
Let's shrink the chart again, and wow, another 16-fold increase in RAM.
Let's shrink again and check this out
and this, and, look where we are today.
So I think we can safely say as far as RAM goes, there's been no slowing down on that.
Ok, so what about processing power?
Let's just look at clock speeds starting in 1975.
The typical speed was 1MHz.
Five years later, there was no real change
and in 1985, we made some progress, and that progress continued into 1990.
We'll need to resize the chart again. You can see the CPU speed really started to take off by the year 2000.
We were already at 400 times faster than we were back in 1980.
Now, we'll have to resize again, and you can see continuing exponential progress in clock speed.
Oddly enough, you'll notice it peaked, and by 2015 it looks like we went backwards.
And well, there are multiple reasons for that
for one thing, clock speed is not really the best measurement for determining a CPU's total power.
Another thing to consider is that these computers started off being 8 bits
and by the mid '80s everyone was using 16-bit machines, and 10 years later everyone was using 32-bit machines.
And only recently did we start using 64-bit machines.
So keep in mind besides just the clock speed, these things can process a lot more data for each clock tick.
And not only that, but most of your modern computers have more than one core
and a core is like its own CPU in and of itself.
So, most computers have anywhere from 2 to 4 cores, and some of them even as many as 8.
So, you can see this chart is not really reflective of CPU power.
So one way you might measure the difference in raw power would be with something like Geekbench.
You could see the original Macbook released in 2005 gets a score of 2,287
where the latest Macbook gets a score of 6,350.
So, if I were to modify this chart to be more reflective of raw CPU power, it would probably look more like this.
I also compared things like graphics, resolution, and hard drive capacity
and I found the same exponential growth that we've seen in the other aspects of computers
and that continues up to the present day.
I even compared average cost of a home computer in this chart, and here's what it looks like adjusted for inflation.
You can see the cost dropped quite a bit for a while, and it's kind of leveled out, it's even going back up a little bit.
That's probably a result of most people switching from desktops to laptops.
So the question I'm trying to answer is:
why is it that a 10-year-old computer today is still usable
but if you go back not too far in the past, a 10-year-old computer was always obsolete.
If computer progress has not slowed, then what's the explanation?
Well, I have one possible theory, and it actually has less to do with the computer's hardware, and more to do with the computer's software.
It goes something like this:
Now this chart is not scientific, but hopefully it makes sense.
If this bar represents the amount of CPU power a computer has
then this part represents how demanding the software is
using up almost all of the computer's power.
Once a new computer comes out that's a little bit more powerful
the owners of this computer can enjoy a really speedy computing experience.
That is, until the next year when new software comes out that requires a faster computer to use.
And then the next year the cycle repeats, and repeats again.
And so this game of cat-and-mouse has been going on for decades.
However, I think what may have finally happened
is that now with each successive year, the software is still getting bigger
but not at the same rate that computing power is increasing
thus making older computers still capable of running modern stuff
maybe not as fast, but it still works.
Well so that's MY theory. But I thought maybe I should ask a few other computer experts and see what they say.
One thing that sort of stood out to me when you were talking about all that was the graph
where the processing power overall went down around 2010 or so.
And that sort of lines up with an interesting time in the personal computer market where
a lot of things like netbooks were getting really popular, tablets were getting there
they were a couple years off probably for being really mainstream
and stuff like Chromebooks and lower end laptops were all the rage for a time.
And a lot of that I think coincides with the matter of usage, that changing around the same time as well
where a lot of people were using web apps and just stuff in-browser as opposed to needing dedicated applications and things like that.
And also, a different age range was starting to use computers way more often at that point.
Older generations and such effectively has doubled since 2006
and a lot of that is basic social networking, photo sharing, even videos
which don't take a ton of processing power
a little more RAM, especially for browsers, but, yeah, I think it's overall
a lot of it has to do with a change in usage.
Thanks David, I agree with your theory, and I think I have a couple of reasons why I think this is happening
or a couple additions to what you've already said.
One is that with Windows Vista, Windows 8 failing so badly, that caused Windows XP to have a lot longer life, a larger market share
that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
And also, there's this big shift to using a web browser for basically all --
all your basic computer tasks can be done in a web browser nowadays.
So, because Windows XP was so prominent, that kind of forced the web browser developers
to continue to support Windows XP, and so you can download the latest Javascript/HTML5 enabled Chrome or Firefox
for Windows XP even today, and it works pretty good on your old computer.
Great question David. I've got a pretty good theory on that.
So if you go back 10, 15 or more years, I think you'll start to see a shift in number of power users to regular users.
Now if you bought a computer in the early '90's, you were more than likely buying it for a specific purpose, to perform a specific function.
While that's still true today, most people just want a window into the Internet.
That's why ARM-based devices like iPads are popular.
Your grandmother may not have had a computer 15 years ago, but she probably does today
and more than likely, she uses it just to surf the Internet.
So while computing resources might not be as much in demand as they used to be
memory resources are still very much in demand.
I'm sure you've seen your web browser running under Task Manager consuming gigabytes of memory.
Hey guys, it's Mike from the Geek Pub.
I'm going to answer this purely from the consumer standpoint
because in the enterprise we still struggle daily to get enough horsepower to run these large customer data applications
whether it be on something like Hadoop or Bigtable or those types of things.
Also in the stock market where we need to make split-time -- or, uh, split-second real-time decisions
whether or not we should make a stock trade
and so we're still struggling with that.
I think that will probably go on for about another decade.
On the consumer side, I think David and Rob really covered it well.
But I think there's a third piece, and that third piece is the cloud
or a fancy way for saying "someone else's computer."
So, it hasn't been that long ago, if you wanted to do banking
that you would install a very bloated app on your computer called Quicken
and you would download all of your bank data and you would analyze it and print checks
and all the types of things that you would need to do to run your home finances.
And, so today all you do is go to www."your bank".com and you use the website to do that
and all the data processing happens on the bank's computers, and your computer is just a window.
And so, yeah, I think that's the third piece.
Much of what we used to do on our computers is now happening
on someone else's computer.
Alright so leave me some comments and tell me what you think is the reason.
Also, for those who may not have seen it yet, I just kinda wanted to point out that
I do have this other really cool channel. It's called 8-bit Keys.
I do a lot of the same stuff as I do here, but it's mostly to do with music synthesis.
On that channel I explore everything about electronic music from the 1980's
including FM synthesizers and computers and game consoles from that era.
Also, I occasionally put together these little performances using nothing but vintage toy keyboards.
♫ [synthesized ballad] ♫
♫ [ Synthesized version of "Canon in D" in the style used in the "Lemmings" DOS game ] ♫
Ok, so I put a link down in the description field, so be sure to click that and check out that channel.
And I'll see you next time.
♫ [ synthesized outro music ] ♫