So, the CRAY-2 built in 1985 was rated at 1.9 GFLOPS. The M2 the author uses seems to be benchmarked at around 6GFLOPs per core [1]. So this 6% of the author's CPU (assuming charitably this is a single core) corresponds to about 20% of the mid 80's peak supercomputer capacity.
People were already using those computers for applications that go slightly beyond animating 5 x 3 green little bars up and down at the time...
I understand dev time cost > CPU time cost (for the company that hires the developpers anyways) but aren't things getting a little out of hand?
Even without comparing to an 80's supercomputer, what if someone with a 15 years old laptop tries to use their app? What will those 6% CPU on the dev's shiny M2 MBP become?
People were already using those computers for applications that go slightly beyond animating 5 x 3 green little bars up and down at the time...
I understand dev time cost > CPU time cost (for the company that hires the developpers anyways) but aren't things getting a little out of hand?
Even without comparing to an 80's supercomputer, what if someone with a 15 years old laptop tries to use their app? What will those 6% CPU on the dev's shiny M2 MBP become?
[1] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/cpu_list.php