This is a great chart, and I've seen it before here on HN.
Just in case you were thinking this is perhaps a counter-example to what I said, I think it's the other way around, it very much supports my claim. The processors have (obviously) gotten faster, and yet for some applications latency has seemingly gone down. Why? Software and requirements are the reason, not hardware.
Terminals also are not an example of the "best systems" in terms of latency. You'd be much closer if you looked at video game latency, or tracked industrial applications that have low latency requirements from the start. The whole reason terminals have gotten slow is that they aren't trying to go fast.
Quite a few of today's most modern terminals have recently added performance as a feature, started rendering with the GPU, and quite predictably, they are restoring super fast response times to our terminals. iTerm2 would be an example of this.
Just in case you were thinking this is perhaps a counter-example to what I said, I think it's the other way around, it very much supports my claim. The processors have (obviously) gotten faster, and yet for some applications latency has seemingly gone down. Why? Software and requirements are the reason, not hardware.
Terminals also are not an example of the "best systems" in terms of latency. You'd be much closer if you looked at video game latency, or tracked industrial applications that have low latency requirements from the start. The whole reason terminals have gotten slow is that they aren't trying to go fast.
Quite a few of today's most modern terminals have recently added performance as a feature, started rendering with the GPU, and quite predictably, they are restoring super fast response times to our terminals. iTerm2 would be an example of this.