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Re:“Fiercely resist any further broadening of the scope of t... by haberman on Thursday April 14, 2016 @12:36PM (#11498169)
People in 1999 weren't running huge neural nets and beating the world champion in Go.

There are millions of computers in data centers around the world. They are working on problems that someone thought it was worthwhile enough to pay for. If C compilers emit code that is slower, that means buying and maintaining a lot more computers, using more energy, producing more greenhouse gas, etc.

Re:“Fiercely resist any further broadening of the scope of t... by dragontamer on Thursday April 14, 2016 @12:41PM (#11498212)
> People in 1999 weren't running huge neural nets and beating the world champion in Go.

Which was mostly GPU code, so it was either CUDA or OpenCL btw. Not actually C.

People do need to realize that the fastest, massively parallel supercomputers are in fact written in CUDA / OpenCL. And the most powerful supercomputers are mostly being used to display 3d-models of a sword-wielder fighting a guy with guns.

Re:“Fiercely resist any further broadening of the scope of t... by haberman on Thursday April 14, 2016 @12:45PM (#11498246)
Fair enough. But some very significant fraction of the hardware and energy spent on data centers today is on CPUs.