[r0ckarong]

HN answer:

To stick with your analogy: There would be more optimization and the rate of releasing stuff would be slower because it would have to be tested. That's it. Remember catrdige based console games? How many patches or day one updated did you have to install there? How many times would they crash or soft-lock themselves? People tested more and optimized more because there were constraints.

Today we have plenty of resources and thus you can be wasteful. Managers trade speed over waste. If you can make it work unoptimized, ship a 150 GB installer and 80 GB day1 patch do it NOW. Money today, not when you're done making it "better" for the user.

Sci-Fi answer: We wouldn't be playing the same type of games. Why would we have to rely on something like our representation of graphics? If the cognition would be 20x faster and more powerful we probably wouldn't need abstractions but would have found a way to dump data into the cognition stream more directly.

I think the idea that 20x faster cognition would just mean "could watch a movie at 480fps" is too limited. More like you could play 24 movies per second and still understand what's going on.

[sloowm]

For the Sci-Fi answer our language would be optimized for extremely fast communication, maybe making sounds from our mouths alone would be way to inefficient. We probably would have easily made stuff that caught up with our cognition. The current hardware and software is more a representation of human limits than other limits.

I think the frame of wasteful is not correct. It's wasteful not to use resources if other resources are restricted and can be substituted by the plentiful. Of course the allocation of current resources can be debated but that is not caused by extra CPU performance, storage and RAM that is available.