What Do We Do When Compute and Memory Stop Getting Cheaper?
nextplatform.com
nextplatform.com
So if throwing effort at hardware no longer improves things, it must be time to put real effort into improving software. No, not making it bigger! Not by adding features. We could start by making it smaller, at reducing/removing/replacing. By investigating alternate models, instead of adding minor tweaks or very-specific-purpose features to our existing software.
Fixing "software" won't be easy, and won't be quick, or cheap. But we've put enormous amounts of effort (money) into hardware. It must be time to put serious effort into some of the alternative software architectures that have been proposed.
People (including on HN!) like to say that cycles are cheap but developer time isn't. There's a reason for this that will be invariant of the actual costs: it's the user that pays for the hardware and the developer that pays for development time. End-users are willing to spend money on hardware, but not software, and this has remained true even as companies like Apple and NVIDIA have blurred the boundary. In the current environment of $0 software, how do you (as a developer) fund more efficient software? I think the likely answer will be that developers will happily lock themselves to whatever vendor offers to solve this problem for them. We've seen this in ML already.
Write software that runs on bare metal, rather than on top of inefficient stacks.