[bharam]

Analogy: "In the past, a well-meaning body of public servants decided there was a need to slow down microprocessors to protect jobs threatened by automation, reduce resource consumption and benefit the climate. CPU frequency was capped at 25MHz and instruction length was limited to 8 bits. The move was hailed as a great victory for humans, nature and the climate"

As a nation, where would we be today (compared to where we are) if a policy like that had actually been adopted?

[ajdlinux]

This analogy is completely broken, obviously.

But off-topic: I wonder what computers would look like if there _were_ arbitrary restrictions like that. What directions would we have pursued in microarchitecture, distributed systems, etc etc if there was a regulation capping clock speed or number of transistors, or a rule that made it illegal to have asymmetric network connections?

[clarry]

Look at mobile CPUs? What limits them might have arised naturally, but it's still quite arbitrary (battery life, cooling capacity).

[bharam]

Enlighten me. How is the analogy broken?

[rpmisms]

Electronic devices != giant diesel engines with very very specific use cases.

[undersuit]

A faster computer can shutdown or enter a lower power mode earlier. The base power draw of a computer hardly changes if you replace just the processor with a faster clocked one.

[pjc50]

There's no Moore's law for ship speeds. If there were, then in the century since tea clippers we'd have ships somehow zipping across the sea at a decent fraction of the speed of light, somehow using less power than the baseline.

In fact that probably would have already made the case for speed restrictions, as every multi-thousand-knot container ship created its own tsunami. There have long been speed restrictions on canals at a few miles an hour to avoid erosion.

[tonyedgecombe]

We would have adapted to the situation we found ourselves in. Some of the most creative solutions can come from constrained environments.

[thefounder]

So you compare automation with pollution? Really?

[bharam]

Nope. Automation is technology and so is transportation. Both can cause pollution but that's besides the point.

[danw1979]

We'd be dying on the roads in droves because faster is always better ?