4 ms·
'What hardware giveth, software taketh away' Suppose we wrote our software again in a compiled language, based on the libraries delivered with the OS, and star
by hyperman1 4y ago
'What hardware giveth, software taketh away'
Suppose we wrote our software again in a compiled language, based on the libraries delivered with the OS, and started doing some more basic algorithmic optimizations again, and keep memory usage in check. A lot of the power gained has been wasted, mainly because it was cheaper for organizations to drop low-quality crap on users and make them upgrade.
If the Moore-party really is over, I expect organizations to start optimizing again up to the point were performance is acceptable.
I see some parallels with plastic: Both plastics and software are basically miracle material, cheap to make anything in huge masses. The result is huge amounts of wastefull practices in both cases.
- xg15 4y agoI don't understand where the "if something is abundant, it can be wasted until it isn't" mindset is coming from, but yeah, given that the last big tech hype was about blockchain, a tech that intentionally wastes as many resources as possible, I guess that mindset is still alive and well.
- FunnyBadger 4y agoThere's an economic paradox about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- hulitu 4y agoJust compare games made for ZX Spectrum, or old DOS games with games made for PCs today. The modern games are huge texture decompressors. On Spectrum you had to use every pixel on the screen even when it was not individually addressable. On modern PCs you use jpeg textures. On Spectrum if you skip some CPU cycles your game will struggle. On modern games you wait hours for the game to update.