

Moore’s Curse: There is a dark side to the revolution in electronics - sergeant3
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/moores-curse

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fsloth
A very good point! "But the doubling time for transistor density is no guide
to technical progress generally. " I would claim increased CPU power has been
detrimental to technical quality for some existing products. New features
could be added without detailed understanding - "it's only a few percent
slower than before" \- but with increased processor speeds the code gets worse
and worse as performance drops are not a business problem since increasing CPU
speeds will take care of them. Until, of course also other problems start to
arise due to shoddy work. And then suddenly the free lunch is over,
multithreading is required amd at which point the maintainers enter a mutex
hell. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here". Increased processor speeds can
either be combined with better algorithms to create magic... or just hide
slapdash hacktastic patchwork.

