Did you know: High-end computers are actually slower than Apple IIe computers released 30 years ago

In the technology world, new products are always introduced with superior strength compared to the old generations in terms of clock, multiplier, number of streams . But in a special parameter, our modern computer It is actually slower than the previous generation computer, which is the speed of computer interaction with commands from humans.

Dan Luu, a former computer engineer who worked at Google and Microsoft, said he felt the new devices didn't run as smoothly as the previous products. He tested a series of desktop devices launched in 1977 to recent computers and tablets.

The results show that modern computers have superior computing capabilities than before. For example: Apple IIe with MOS 6502 processor can implement 0.43 MIPS (million instructions per second - every second), Intel i7-7700k can implement 27,000 MIPS.

But in terms of computer response to human interaction, Apple IIe was born more than 30 years ago and is faster than any modern computer.

Luu used two cameras, one with a speed of 240 frames per second, the other one was 1000 frames per second to measure the computer's response time, from pressing a character on the keyboard until it appeared. on the terminal window. The results show that for 1 character to go to the screen, Apple IIe takes 30ms while PowerSpec g405 with the new Intel i7 processor takes 200ms.

Luu's test results on different computers.

From his testing, Luu discovered that the operating system and the scanning frequency (refresh rate) of the monitor significantly affected the speed of the computer's response.

For example, the frequency of scanning and displaying characters on the 24Hz screen Haswell-e processor takes 140ms, while on the 165Hz screen is 50ms.

With the operating system, new versions need to take multiple steps to enter a character. For example, with iOS, when pressing a character on the iPad, it needs to go through 11 steps.

Not only in iOS, all operating systems must support a wide range of devices. This makes Android devices Luu tested slower than iOS, and operating systems like Windows or MacOS X later on the same computer compared to Chrome OS, MacOS 9.

Detailed results of Luu's test on mobile devices.

But the latency of modern computers is not a terrible thing, it's a trade-off. Our computers now do more work than a computer 30 years ago even though they have higher latency.

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