Despite all the defenses of such by progammers who claim hardware always improving and code cosmetics/organizational trends obviate software performance concerns, I can attest to the reality that I composed electronic music with completely software instruments and effects on 512mb ram on earlier versions of certain unnamed DAW's with all the "latest" plugins at the time. My last Macbook pro 2011 with 4gb ram on Snow Leopard was sufficient, but once I updated it to Yosemite and went from Cubase 5 to Cubase 9, from Ableton 5.5 to Ableton 10, that it went from "performing just fine" to basically running the fan the entire time and glitching at basic playback of sessions I was previously working on no problem. (same plugins). The Steinberg Cubase one being the biggest noticable turd, and I blame their acquisition by Yamaha, as the customer-service also went down the tubes, as I waited months to get a reply on a replacement USB dongle (also a sucky thing for a laptop with 2 USB ports, but I digress)
Software bloat kills. It's not all deliberate, but if our values don't change from "who cares" to "we care", we can't expect any change. Is uncaring mega-corp structure the cause? (programmer wants to go home, project is badly managed, bugs outnumber features, let's start a new project, etc?) I'm curious what folks think is the cause of poor-quality buggy bloated "modern" software that is demonstrably worse than older software.
It's not an improvement in technology, it's simply that our modern world cares more about superficial animated menu openings than about performance.
Mind you, not ALL software follows this trend. Reaper still kicks A, but that's because Mr. Frankl has a vision, integrity, and still maintains control lol
anyway, about chips and processes, it's not about getting tinier and tinier, it's about an intelligent design. All the efficiency improvements in the process are wasted if the goal is to make a mega-poo-renderer that renders 0.1 turds per KW of power expended.
Controversial thought of the day: I will reckon that a simple interrupt driven event-loop on a microcontroller running all HID input is a million times more efficient than the convoluted way a context switching multitasking operating system handles the same under full load with full memory saturation.
Generally, I take it to mean still runs old sofware, but not compatible with current software.