The fact that they can sometimes struggle with simple things such as reading emails (Gmail, cough) is telling something about some of the modern programming practices...
I'll double down this. Deeper Blue, IBM's machine that crushed Kasparov in the iconic chess match in 1997, has less computing power than an GTX 1070. So my computer, 20 years later, is more powerful and it plays Flight Simulator in glorious ultra details.
That a GPU from 2016 is more powerful than a supercomputer from 1997 is unsurprising.
Does anyone know around which year consumer computers started being more powerful than Deeper Blue? Wikipedia says Deeper Blue was rated at 11 GFLOPS, which is... nothing, by modern standards. The GTX 3080ti is rated at 30000 FP32 GFLOPS.
On another hand, comparing GFLOPS from Deeper Blue vs a modern gpu FP32 GFLOPS is probably meaningless.
Deeper Blue was not a general purpose computer, it had loads of chess-specific hardware. So it's tricky and not very meaningful to compare it to modern computers.
Do you imply that Google is somehow using Gmail as a trojan horse to harvest CPU cycles and do some business with them? Like hashing crypto or SETI@Home?
Demoscene is spending a lot of effort to make things as efficient as possible. Other programmers have other priorities. Clearly the performance is what it is because "running in a browser" was deemed non-negotiable (as it strengthens Google, and then the performance just had to be "good enough" (with Google's lead and market size).
> The size of this data set, which is continuously updated and expanded, is now at three petabytes (and growing)
You're not downloading that much data at installation time, so I assume there's a crucial online component where stuff gets streamed in (partially simulated?) from the server, and your computer is just handling what's currently in view. That seems much more feasible.
Seems like base geometry with base textures are on local hard drive, beyond that higher resolution textures are streamed from cloud, down to 3cm precision, insane.
I bought it when I had a pretty good PC (Ryzen 9, 2070S, memory for days). I’ve since sold it and opted for much less powerful machine. I’d be scared to try it on less than what I was running it on at the time.
