Hardware Bottlenecks

We prices of hardware are getting cheaper and cheaper. If we werent using legacy computers, the whole world could be buying massive amounts of power.

General processors (cpu) and specialized processors (video cards) are really powerful and affordable. We now can create a super fast computer with a fraction of the price of a few years ago. A HUGE potential is simply wasted. Except for gaming, video creation and some other situations, a person will not use it at full power 99% of the time.

Both permanent storage (hard drive disks) and non permanent (RAM) are also very affordable. A terabyte HHD is cheaper than two 500 GB, which are cheaper than 4 of 250 GB. The current inflexion point is around 1.5 TB, but is progressing.

With so resources available, good programs are getting less and less relevant. Algorithms are for people who don’t know how to buy computers.

We are now focusing on extract the most of our bottlenecks. Power consumption, wired and wireless connections speed are probably the biggest ones. We still are about to see a ground breaking technology to deal with these. Meanwhile, solutions like cache and problems like lack of synchronization between devices will persist.