On: Don't remove the $(nop) command below

[WildUtah]

When new faster CPUs appear, they add more nops.

[kibwen → WildUtah]

Per Moore's law, the number of nops must double every 18 months. For codebases originally written in 1977, the year of make's origin, this now measures in the dozens of meganops.

[throwanem → kibwen]

How apropos! "Dozens of meganops" was my instant reaction to the linked makefile, too.

[DonHopkins → kibwen]

Now you can execute billions of peta-nops in parallel using GPU hardware acceleration in the cloud.

[Retr0spectrum → kibwen]

To be extra pedantic, Moore's law says nothing about clock speed.

[reitzensteinm → Retr0spectrum]

To be extra, extra pedantic, clock speed is not the only factor. You must also take in to account the number of NOPs executed per cycle (NPC).

Indeed, chip architects would struggle to find a way to execute vast quantities of NOPs efficiently until the release of the Itanium in 2001.

[__jal → reitzensteinm]

Don't forget the infamous NOP bug that made all the headlines in the late 90s, when certain values of NOP would actually do something.