Nearly a 15 years ago a moment of awe hit me. I’d just finished implementing an Octree for a 3D game engine and was testing it. Tens of thousands of polygons were being rendered 60 times a second. The power of what my computer (viva GPU!) was simply awe-inspiring.
Fast forward 15 years and I find myself writing a high performance networking application. While doing a chunk of code for timers there’s a call to query how many cycles per second the CPU will perform:
Over 3.5 billion.
Think about that for a moment. Each logical core on a single die is performing 3.5 billion instructions per second. The sheer quantity of things being computed should give pause. The question is: what will we harness power to do?