Friday, October 17, 2008

Optimize your app - play Quake!

The quake optimization rule:
Your boss comes to you because your code is running too slow. You take a week to look at the code. Then you go back to your boss an say, that it takes you about 18 month to get a performance improvement by factor two.
Your boss then says, well thats all right.
You go back to your cube and play Quake for 18 month and wait for the next generation of Intel processors.

http://nothing.nin.net/gif/o.quake.gif That is an interesting application of Moors Law. But Ted's point is, that those times are over. Scaling processor power with higher frequencies has reached its limits.
Increasing the cores in processors, does not make your existing applications faster for free. Entirely new programming concepts have to be applied to make use of the additional power.
Functional languages can be helpful in implementing those concepts.

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