Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ...
by ethbr1 on Saturday October 21, 2023 @10:05PM
(#37972225)
From a hardware perspective, the ACM cycle discussed is tightly tied to continued general purpose CPU performance gains.
There are many pure-performance classes of software, where more performance = more value. Those classes have been diverging since the 80s (media playback), 90s (graphics), 00s (mobile), and ~10s (gpgpu).
But there are other classes that are functionality limited. E.g. electronic medical record or enterprise resource planning.
If software functionality were more plastic or expanded in those, the same general purpose performance would then be more valuable, and investment would also be incentivized.
Accepting the inevitability of divergent, harder to user-program platforms, when we still have a lot of value on the table feels premature.
And like it bodes badly for further losses of user computing-sovereignty as hyper-optimized hardware makes cloud platforms more attractive and kills off user-owned processing.
There are many pure-performance classes of software, where more performance = more value. Those classes have been diverging since the 80s (media playback), 90s (graphics), 00s (mobile), and ~10s (gpgpu).
But there are other classes that are functionality limited. E.g. electronic medical record or enterprise resource planning.
If software functionality were more plastic or expanded in those, the same general purpose performance would then be more valuable, and investment would also be incentivized.
Accepting the inevitability of divergent, harder to user-program platforms, when we still have a lot of value on the table feels premature.
And like it bodes badly for further losses of user computing-sovereignty as hyper-optimized hardware makes cloud platforms more attractive and kills off user-owned processing.