Yeah - I look at the last few decades of computing and see the great god of compatibility driving almost everything. It's all very well the author seeing some cute ideas and running with them, but not many are in a position to discard everything, so we will do as we've done for the last few decades and pick the technology that lets us build on what we've got.
You don't have to look far for examples. Remember Intel Optane memory - a genuine improvement to memory. But because it doesn't match well with existing OS and apps, Intel struggled to do much with it, and seems to have largely dropped it :(
I'd love if even a few had the opportunity to tidy-up our decades of history and mistakes, but I don't see it happening.
This can be summarized as “hardware and software coevolve.” Neither can deviate too terribly from the constraints and requirements of the other.
Of the two software can perhaps deviate more, but at the cost of performance. Software that deviates too far from hardware ends up effectively being an emulator for alien hardware.
Hardware is more constrained. If there is no software nobody uses it. There is perhaps a way out in the form of JITs and translators and emulators but it’s very difficult to make that work well. The current crop of x64 to ARM64 translators found on Mac and Windows ARM PCs are one of the few cases where I have seen that work.
Intel with Optane should have just presented it as a crazy fast hard drive specializes for databases. If you can get some use case going the hardware can find a niche and then software makers will start exploring what else it can do.
Exactly. This is all an economic question that involves humans, how plentiful they're trained in different topics, the availability of different resources, security requirements (Cold War 2.0 ups security costs, for example), and many other unknown factors like relative breakthroughs in AI, physics, quantum, etc.
But that said, I think point 2 (much more bizarre hardware) is basically guaranteed. As OSS and cloud provided services (e.g., RDS) centralizes our approaches to common problems to a small set of commonly used libraries the common functions of those libraries will continue to get baked into hardware and lower and lower overheads (not just chips, think busses between, etc). Basically TPUs and M2s are the pretremors of what is to come.
I basically think of this all as a massive economic / search problem with highly aligned actors between their neighbouring layers. Though not necessarily beyond their neighbouring layers. For example, breakthroughs in mathematics or in AI driven mathematics could, say, 10x LLVM optimization for common tasks which would dampen demand for CPU in the short to medium term until the economic growth catches up to demand even more in the long term.
I've also seen Optane recommended as cache for ZFS pools[0]. I wonder if Intel is sufficiently disillusioned with Optane to license it to another manufacturer. Particularly with the CHIPS act in place, perhaps there's room for someone to take another run at it.
I'd love to see Optane used as the basis for a non-volatile OS. Unfortunately pretty much all our substantial software "needs" to be restarted occasionally, so a non-volatile system is not so practical :(
i feel hardware evolve and we now can use more of we already develop decades ago but was inpractical, i fell not as much progres is made in the software side of thing dont get me wrong we got better compilers, and software piplelines.
but i feel most of our stack isnt more productive, we are moving in circuls dont get me wrong cloud is cool but is 90% hardware, the same ci/cd and deep learning
therese some spark of brilaince software desing surrrealdb for example but is small and sparce and in generals this type of ideas doesnt steak even if they are better
You don't have to look far for examples. Remember Intel Optane memory - a genuine improvement to memory. But because it doesn't match well with existing OS and apps, Intel struggled to do much with it, and seems to have largely dropped it :(
I'd love if even a few had the opportunity to tidy-up our decades of history and mistakes, but I don't see it happening.