this seems less like fine dining, and more like a fancy kitchen. this is much more about the chef (though there are possibly secondary effects for diners).
If you consider hardware is a commodity and the cost of opportunity for replacing hardware instead of optimizing software is worth it, then formulate it better.
One may object by saying that the burden on hardware resources is higher because we consume more data, which is partially right. Although I don't intend to give a thorough objection here, please consider those two points:
- The payload fraction is larger in multimedia applications, for sure, but I can't see a reason why the "propellant mass fraction" equivalent in software should be bigger than it was, for example, 10 years ago. If we consider text-only data as an example, we notice that the propellant mass fraction increased as well.
- Higher level languages undeniably consume more resources by orders of magnitude; hardware frequencies must keep up by orders of magnitude as well.