I'm more amazed that the hardware industry has hoisted our shit software into usable state. Just bravo.
I can only imagine the people working on the actual chips are screaming in silence somewhere at the complete waste of energy we've made.
I can only imagine the people working on the actual chips are screaming in silence somewhere at the complete waste of energy we've made.
The old canard that programmer time was worth more than processing time that bad coders quote is less and less true by the year; SWEs who are able to wring better performance out of less hardware resources are going to become more valuable in the future.
As much as I'd like for this prediction to come true, I think it's wishful thinking. Compute capacity continues to increase exponentially while (human) cognitive resources, for all practical purposes, do not, which means less efficient code will continue to be the more economically viable option as far as I can tell.
Even with AI, where we're essentially trading compute (used for running code) for extended cognitive resources (used for writing code), what incentive exists to channel those resources into writing faster code rather than writing the same code faster?
https://www.st.com/resource/en/errata_sheet/es0182-stm32f405... https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/errata/IMXRT1170CE.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/errata/IMX8_1N94W.pdf
As a dev, this bothers me a great deal. We have miracle machines on our desks and in our pockets, and 80% of the capabilities of that hardware are pissed away by terribly inefficient software.