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I was recently asked "you guys spend so much efforts on creating and promoting fancier smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks and other consumer crap. It would have been so much better if those resources were spent to drive technology that helps medicine, research, education, space exploration, more power efficient industry and energy, etc"
The answer to this rant is simple, it is actually so apparent that I wonder why it is not a part of common sense.
There are two trends that enable compute performance progress: making more complex CPU architectures, and refining silicon process technology. Both reinforce each other, and both tend to become more expensive to sustain as time goes. If CPU arch and process technology R&D was not paid for by billions of consumers who are eager to pay for new bells and whistles in their newest gadget, the computing progress would have already stopped by now.
So improvements it brings to scientific/HPC, healthcare (advanced diagnostics, genetics, drug research), industrial (more energy and material efficient manufacturing), aerospace (safer avionics) etc etc would not be possible if nobody buys gadgets to play angry birds. There are many more indisputably useful applications of more powerful CPUs than those I just listed.
In a communist utopia where gadgets would have been functional and designed to last, the government would have to allocate funds it taxes to computing research. In our capitalist society, consumers are happily impose this tax to themselves.
The answer to this rant is simple, it is actually so apparent that I wonder why it is not a part of common sense.
There are two trends that enable compute performance progress: making more complex CPU architectures, and refining silicon process technology. Both reinforce each other, and both tend to become more expensive to sustain as time goes. If CPU arch and process technology R&D was not paid for by billions of consumers who are eager to pay for new bells and whistles in their newest gadget, the computing progress would have already stopped by now.
So improvements it brings to scientific/HPC, healthcare (advanced diagnostics, genetics, drug research), industrial (more energy and material efficient manufacturing), aerospace (safer avionics) etc etc would not be possible if nobody buys gadgets to play angry birds. There are many more indisputably useful applications of more powerful CPUs than those I just listed.
In a communist utopia where gadgets would have been functional and designed to last, the government would have to allocate funds it taxes to computing research. In our capitalist society, consumers are happily impose this tax to themselves.
