Comment by 6510

It is quite surreal to me that this was not the road taken. Optimizing software doesn't have the same potential as optimizing hardware but i'd say 1/70 is significant. If thousands of people would work on this indefinitely the time would drop to seconds. That code would also be completely incomprehensible. The argument that people should just buy a faster computer could just as easily have worked out the other way around, just write faster software. Going the hardware way gave us really really readable code which is great. The other direction however would have given us really really cheap devices. Receiving and sending a signal for [say] a chat application requires very little stuff. It would be next to impossible to add images, word suggestions or spell checkers. We could still bake mature applications onto dedicated chips. But until now those efforts went pretty much nowhere(?) I imagine one could quite easily bake a mail client or server, or a torrent client, irc, perhaps even a gui for windowed applications. Maybe an error console?