[crubier]

Everything would be exactly the same, except 8.64years later.

Moore's law show that CPU speeds double every 2years. 2years * log2(20) = 8.64years, so we'd just be 8.64years late, that's it, literally no reason for anything to be any different apart from that.

95% of comments seem to completely overlook this fact and go into deep explanations about how everything would be different. It's pretty surprising that even a pretty sciencey community like Hacker News still doesn't get exponentials.

[planb]

Moore's Law actually refers to the density of transistors on a chip doubling approximately every two years, not CPU speed. Yes, CPUs still get exponentially faster, but this affects multi core throughput, single thread performance improves way slower. For human perception and interactivity, this makes a huge difference. So it stands to reason if algorithms would have been parallelized earlier and better, but I doubt that the timeline would just be shifted a few years.

[The_Colonel]

Arrogant and factually incorrect, a dangerous combination.

But apparently you also didn't get the question - hardware would stay slow, but software would continue evolving, the question is how, given the hardware constraints. It would definitely not be "exactly the same, except 8.64years later".

[fifteen1506]

Still think mine is even more general :)

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/435/

My comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39977838