> If our computers never got faster, we would never get faster computers (obviously...) to run efficient code even faster. 3D rendering and physics simulation c

> If our computers never got faster, we would never get faster computers (obviously...) to run efficient code even faster. 3D rendering and physics simulation come to mind. The solution to that is a few decades old: plug-in a 3D rendering card. (Of course there's the whole system bus issue, but that's largely solved by a bigger bus, rather than a faster CPU and more system memory. 3d programs requiring more cpu/memory is largely software bloat) A few decades ago there was a lot of research into system-level parallel processing. The idea was to just add more machines to scale up processing power (if needed). But because machines got faster, there was less need for it, so the research was mostly abandoned. We would all be using distributed OSes today if it weren't for faster machines.