logoalt Hacker News

jandrewrogerstoday at 4:56 PM0 repliesview on HN

The big thing that changed is that almost all software performance today is bandwidth-bound at the limit. Not computation-bound. This transition was first noticed in supercomputing around 25 years ago.

Optimization of bandwidth-bound code is almost purely architectural in nature. Most of our software best practices date from a time when everything was computation-bound such that architecture could be ignored with few bad effects.