[tluyben2]

> Why do we need more computer power?

A lot of the latest revolutions (good or bad, that's up to the reader); crunching huge data, ML, every more realistic simulations etc comes from every faster machines. If that growth stops, the article suggests we do something that was (and still is in some circles) normal in the 70-80s with homecomputers and consoles; because you could not upgrade the hardware and almost nothing was compatible (which is the most common reason the IBM PC won) to the next generation, you optimised the software to get everything from that existing hardware you had on your desk. And people are still doing that.

One of my personal miracle examples; my first love was the MSX computer, which is a Z80 3.58mhz computer with (in my case) 128kb in it. This machine could do nice games for the time and some business applications. Many years later, that same physical hardware (I still have my first one) can do this [0]. Obviously the hardware was always capable of doing this, but it needed many years (decades) for programmer(s) to figure out how to get every ounce of performance and memory utilization out of these things and push it beyond what anyone thought possible.

If the improvements in performance stagnate, there is a lot of room for getting most out of the existing hardware. I would think though that in the case of modern hardware, the geniuses that get to that point will get some language to compile to this optimised optimum instead of having to handcode and optimise applications like the Symbos guy did.

[0] http://www.symbos.de/