As a programmer
As a programmer I feel the urge to oppose this “there is no alterative” non-sense. When it comes to number crunching on the big irons, speculative execution doesn’t get you much.
When it comes to the normal user and your everyday experience, better code could easily speed up the performance by a factor of ten and more.
In the recent years we have seen software becoming slower and slower. It is almost as if chip makers ordered their minions to apply handbrakes everywhere.
The new Gnome has introduced JavaScript on the desktop. It’s everywhere now. The new Gnome was so slow that they received tons of complains. This, running on 3-4 GHz CPUs with 4-16 cores, is sheer insanity! KDE has its python crap everywhere.
Wherever you look, programmers are trying to slow down your everyday experience. Just look at Android. Their phones now have eight cores and four GB of RAM or more. Some people say that you shouldn’t buy a phone with less than two GB, because “multitasking” isn’t going to work well, otherwise.
Those phones are yesterday’s workstations. They are running a system that is so inefficient that it hogs gigabytes of memory and needs gigahertz to display the system interface without excessive delays. It’s a joke.
We don’t need super-fast processors for typical usages. Better programming can speed up your experience more than a liquid hydrogen cooled super processor could. As a conclusion, we don’t need bogus processors. We could do very well without them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
