Overhead of individual python apps

[Steve Holden]

Paul Boddie wrote:
> Steve Holden wrote:
> 
>>Even embedded systems are much larger now than the minicomputers of
>>yesteryear. Everything's relative. Just wait three years!
> 
> 
> Had you placed such a bet in 2000, you'd have cleaned up at the
> "Moore's Law Casino", but there are various factors at work now which
> complicate the once-inevitable trends of hardware performance and the
> corresponding advice to people wishing to speed up or slim down their
> software: the flattening out of the CPU frequency curve and the
> tendency of CPU manufacturers to choose multiple core strategies are
> two things which prevent applications from speeding up all by
> themselves; whilst storage density is still increasing, as far as I
> know, I'd imagine other strategies being adopted in system architecture
> which could make performance tradeoffs more pronounced in accessing all
> that storage.
> 
> In other words, expect many more threads about global interpreter locks
> in the coming three years than we've seen in the last three or even six
> years. ;-)
> 
I seem to remember blogging about this a while ago, or perhaps just 
ranting at c.l.py ... anyway, bottom line is that most people have more 
than adequate power for their current needs in a present-day 
single-processor computer.

Expect also to see computational methods focus more on memory-intensive 
techniques impractical in the past.

regards
  Steve
-- 
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