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Hopefully the end of cost-effective process shrinks will mean programmers start cleaning up the mess of hugely inefficient everyday software. The party may be

Hopefully the end of cost-effective process shrinks will mean programmers start cleaning up the mess of hugely inefficient everyday software. The party may be winding down for full x86-64 cores, but there's still some room for improvement by increasing efficiency of instructions on those cores and adding new instructions for common tasks (like hashing acceleration instructions, sse9000, etc). Intel already does that with each new processor family. There's a large one-time improvement available for computation-heavy workloads by integrating many simpler high-performance low-power cores into everyday machines (like the epiphany architecture: http://www.adapteva.com/ http://www.adapteva.com/). Intel seems to think only servers will go that route (Xeon Phi), but I don't know about that.

klibertp 13y ago
> start cleaning up the mess of hugely inefficient everyday software I kind of wish for it too. Mainly because it's so enjoyable and fun to spend hours on really groking the code and optimizing it instead of duct taping another feature at the top of similarly messy pile of other features. Things like Go, D, Nimrod, Felix, OCaml and Haskell could help too. That said I don't see this happening in the near future: for business side of things optimization starts to matter when it's too late to change technology. What's probably going to happen is one-click, transparent (for the application logic) clusters, where performance issues are solved by adding nodes. It happens right now with AWS and others, but it will be much easier and better in the future, once again making optimization not needed. For a while.