Re: Hardware Isn't the Issue
Short version: Well, ehhhhh, not really. It's much more complicated than that RE software, and HW has absolutely continued to advance at a staggering pace, even *with* transistor limits, but its still got its own issues.
There are a lot of things being conflated and confused here, but I'll pick at one in particular.
In many cases you have the stagnant hardware/software performance relationship backwards. E.g. software in some cases stalled because there was no way to gain any further performance because the HW didn't offer meaningful benefits, so why bother? Consider the flatlining of CPU core cycles per second. This means that many single-core processes simply cannot get much faster short of highly specialized instructions, and even those may be of limited utility. And many processes cannot be meaningfully parallelized for performance gains, and are not cost effective to port to specialized hardware.
On the other side, cheap memory and storage resources that made software easier to develop, so we didn't have to be nearly as clever, which in turn disincentivized being particular efficient...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
