If you aren't convinced by your ubuntu being 1% faster, consider how many servers, VMs and containers run ubuntu. Millions of servers using a fraction of a percent less energy multiplies out to a lot of energy

"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"

I put a lot of effort into chasing wins of that magnitude. Over a huge userbase, something like that has a big positive ROI. These days it also affects important things like heat and battery life.

The other part of this is that the wins add up. Maybe I manage to find 1% every couple of years. Some of my coworkers do too. Now you're starting to make a major difference.

If you would only accept 10x improvements, I would argue progress would be very small.

Well one example could be llama.cpp . It's critical for them to use every single extension the CPU has move more bits at a time. When I installed it I had to compile it.

This might make it more practical to start offering OS packages for things like llama.cpp

I guess people that don't have newer hardware aren't trying to install those packages. But maybe the idea is that packages should not break on certain hardware.

Blender might be another one like that which really needs the extensions for many things. But maybe you so want to allow it to be used on some oldish hardware anyway because it still has uses that are valid on those machines.

I don't think this is a valid argument to make. If you were doing the optimization work then you could argue tradeoffs. You are not, Canonical is.

Your decision is which image you want to use, and Canonical is giving you a choice. Do you care about which architecture variant you use? If you do, you can now pick the one that works best for you. Do you want to win an easy 1% performance gain? Now you have that choice.

  > where that 1% is worth any hassle

Let's say you have a process that takes 100hrs to run and costs $1k/hr. You save an hour and $1k every time you run the process. You're going to save quite a bit. You don't just save the time to run the process, you save literal time and everything that that costs (customers, engineering time, support time, etc).

Let's say you have a process that takes 100ns and similarly costs $1k/hr. You now run in 99ns. Running the process 36 million times is going to be insignificant. In this setting even a 50% optimization probably isn't worthwhile (unless you're a high frequency trader or something)

This is where the saying "premature optimization is the root of all evil" comes from! The "premature" part is often disregarded and the rest of the context goes with it. Here's more context to Knuth's quote[0].

  There is no doubt that the holy grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

  Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.

So yes, there are plenty of times where that optimization will be worthwhile. The percentages don't mean anything without the context. Your job as a programmer is to determine that context. And not just in the scope of your program, but in the scope of the environment you expect a user to be running on. (i.e. their computer probably isn't entirely dedicated to your program)

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/356635.356640 (alt) https://sci-hub.se/10.1145/356635.356640

Perhaps if you're doing CPU-bound math you might see an improvement?

Standard advice: You are not Google.

I'm surprised and disappointed 1% is the best they could come up with, with numbers that small I would expect experimental noise to be much larger than the improvement. If you tell me you've managed a 1% improvement you have to do a lot to convince me you haven't actually made things 5% worse.