CompuServe Messages

I just finished reading an article in Dr. Dobb's which "enlightened" me in several ways. It had to do with CPU evolution in the past couple of decades and how we somewhat got our faces against the wall as performance increase has reached a barrier. It went on defining all the good things about the Pentium and "Hexium", and SuperSparc, and DEC Alpha, etc. According to the article, the reasons that make the Pentium faster than anything are present (by definition) in the P24 version which makes my comparison with the 386DX/SX somewhat invalid. The real gem of the article was its very last paragraph. The context is that it may be a long while before we see a quantum jump in CPU performance again. The paragraphs ends like this: "… Who knows, efficient operating systems and efficient application programs may make a come back. Soon, programmers won't be able to depend on the next generation microprocessor to run their absurdities…" Oh how good I feel after reading that. Specially with all this oophla around the current trend of producing code so bloated that it would sink the Titanic. I'm pretty neurotic when it comes to code efficiency. It makes me sick when I see the crap that goes out the door nowadays taking huge amount of space for nothing.