Web browsers aren't simple. Every web page is a complicated nest of sizing constraints and it seems like hardly a CSS property is added without making that worse. And then IE4 had to come along and make all of these sizing constraints dynamically changeable. And then we wanted fancier font rendering, so glyphs weren't free or even cheap anymore.
And I'm just talking text & tags here, not even remotely about anything like OpenGL or video, just core browser stuff.
You can render web pages on mere dribbles of power with Links/Lynx, but it's not some sort of mere coincidence that the result is a much degraded experience, it's actually fundamental to what a web browser is nowadays. I mean, look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTnIxIA5KGw And that's a simple webpage.
No. This is simply not true, at least at the extreme you are suggesting.
What I have open on my quad-core 8GB RAM desktop right now: two Eclipse sessions; One emacs server, with about 20 client windows; Firefox, with 30+ tabs; 20 or so console sessions; five PDFs of documentation; an IRC client; an image viewer and a Jabber client. All of this is spread over two big monitors, with antialiased fonts, fast scrolling, lots of undo history and all sorts of good things.
The truth is that expectations have changed. Say all you want about having 1000 users on a single core, but users today are getting a much richer environment, and capabilities that we only could have dreamed of twenty years ago. This isn't waste or inefficiency, it's using what we have.
Web browsers are also far from simple. High resolution graphics, interactive sites, multiple format support, dynamic content loading, antialiased fonts and all these other things do add up. Compare that to what a user was doing on a tiny slice of a machine 20 years ago. I'd call it progress.
http://davelargo.blogspot.com/2012/02/250-concurrent-users-t...
Heck, just a unicode font that includes every character in the basic plane takes 22Meg! Did that guys 1989 unix box display Chinese, Japanese and Korean?
It's essentially a niche operating system, and isn't going to do 1/10th of the stuff that one written with "bloatware" is going to be capable of. I mean, look at what it has for a browser: http://www.menuetos.net/098b3.png
The whole multimedia thing, you know.
Also, this Android box costs and weighs a fraction of that wonderful machine you used to serve 1000 of users.
So I'd still call it a progress worth 25 years of technology evolution.
But, iRobot, why should we care about efficiencies? Energy grows on trees.
I predict we are going to see many, many more ARM devices. And Apple is going to lead the way.
This is going to bother some people who like to write bloated, inefficient code. Their focus is on multi-core and concurrency. But to do simple things (retrieving text, images, audio, or video via http, sending/receiving email, etc), one does not need that much power.
The rise of ARM will create opportunity for a different set of programmers who are more efficiency-conscious.