[awegio]

Related: The Hardware Lottery (https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489)

It goes both ways: processors are built to accelerate existing applications, and applications are built to run with the constraints of the hardware. This holds back progress towards better systems where both new kind of hardware and software is required.

This is part of the reason why research into neural networks was so slow for a long time, and took off only after GPUs for 3d graphics came around.