Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
I&#x27;ve noticed the trend of ever-increasingly complex hardware with little or no change in performance since the 90s, and ranted about it extensively since I joined HN. I think we&#x27;re past considering the problem from a technical perspective and need to look at the conspiratorial forces involved.<p>To me, the problem is one of monopoly and corporate thinking. When Intel and AMD make most of the chips, we end up with a Coke vs Pepsi mentality. There may be a hundred other hungry manufacturers, but without access to capital they&#x27;ll never get enough traction to scale.<p>Around 2000, FPGAs were set to go mainstream and let us design CPUs of our own, but Xilinx chose to keep them proprietary so they never evolved. It&#x27;s unfortunate that the company most capable of thwarting the status quo is the one propping it up. But they were trendsetters, that&#x27;s how it&#x27;s going with all things tech now.<p>Then Nvidia mostly monopolized the GPU industry and sent us down the SIMD rabbit hole. So we can process large vector buffers at great personal effort ..and that&#x27;s about it.<p>What I and I think a lot of people probably want is a return to big dumb processors. Something like a large array of RISC-V cores with local memories connected via content-addressable memory and copy-on-write that presents a symmetric, unified address space that can be driven with traditional desktop programming languages. Had a CPU like this kept up with Moore&#x27;s law, we would have had a 10 core machine in 2000, a 1,000 core machine around 2010 and a 100,000 core machine today, reaching between 1 million and 10 million cores by 2030. Which shows just how incredibly slow CPUs are vs what they could be.<p>The situation is so bad that I&#x27;ve all but given up on things ever improving. I mostly think about getting out of programming now and going back to living a normal life in the time I have left. Because the writing is on the wall: SIMD will deliver a narrowly conceived notion of neural network AI that&#x27;s &quot;good enough&quot; and will stop all further evolution of CPUs. We&#x27;ll miss out on the dozen or so other approaches like genetic algorithms and be forever separated from simple brute-force methods that &quot;just work&quot;. The AI will soon be like Mrs. Davis and the vast majority of people will be face-down in their phones, then connected neurologically. The arrival of WALL-E and Idiocracy will coincide with the destruction of the natural world by 2100 and that will be that.<p>The argument really comes down to centralized control vs distributed resilience and freedom. It&#x27;s pretty obvious which one we have right now, and that it&#x27;s getting worse each year. Now I look on each headline with growing weariness, picking up on which mistakes will be doubled down on, which kool-aid they want us to drink this time. Because without the intervention of at least one successful internet lottery winner, or a concerted effort by thousands of hobbyists, there&#x27;s simple no viable path from where we are now to where we could be, making the vast majority of the work we do a waste of time in the face of the potential we might have had.<p>It&#x27;s hard to write anymore without sounding like a fringe lunatic projecting frustration on a world that is blissfully unaware that anything&#x27;s even wrong. I&#x27;m probably wrong for doing so. Just another reason to probably get out of this business.