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scheme271today at 8:14 AM1 replyview on HN

Energy consumption wasn't really a concern when the idiom developed. I don't think people really cared about the energy consumption of instructions until well into the x86-64 era.


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allenrbtoday at 12:56 PM

Not sure why this is being downvoted, but it’s absolutely correct. For most of the history of computing, people were happy that it worked at all. Being concerned about energy efficiency is a recent byproduct of mobile devices and, even more recently, giant amounts of compute adding up to gigawatts.