Comment by zephen
19 hours ago
On the one hand, the list isn't wrong.
On the other hand, more fortunes have been made by assuming that physics will catch up (closely enough, anyway) to computational needs, than by assuming that every byte and every cycle and every nanosecond matters.
In 2026 Moore's law has mostly stopped. My computer from 10 years ago still has acceptable performance today. My computer from 15 years ago would struggle a bit but still get the job done. This is nothing like the 90s where you actually could wait two years for all of that year's conceivable performance problems to be solved.
Dennard scaling has stopped (performance/clock speed increasing), Moore's law means mostly transistor count or density. The former is still going strong, the latter is slowing down.
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Making money and being highly available are different goals.
Stock markets and commercial Telecomms beg to differ
Is every business a stock market and commercial Telecomm?
6 replies →
That's like saying money is only spent on sw/hw systems which rely on ever-growing compute capacity.
Reality: embedded systems are a thing. And there's (lots of!) money in that business too. There's maaaany applications where some (fixed) amount of compute does the job, and the simplest/cheapest device that does it wins out.
> Reality: embedded systems are a thing.
I've worked in embedded, and chips, and embedded chips for most of my career.
> There's maaaany applications where some (fixed) amount of compute does the job, and the simplest/cheapest device that does it wins out.
There's usually quite a bit factored in for slop in these days, because time-to-market is a thing. There's also sometimes a cost-reduction stage (yeah, I've been involved in cost reductions where a penny a unit was awesome), but you don't bother doing the cost-reduction phase unless you have the volume to support it.
Warren Buffet famously said that "Concentration builds wealth, diversification preserves it."
In much of computing, even embedded, demos and prototypes build a product, and the right-sizing of everything to make it even more profitable happens later, if it is worth it.