The sad fact is that the general public only seems to care about the fancy buttons.
I think general public does care. Every couple of years, people lament the lack of speed that their laptops have. All of your programs are beefy, because people want quick turn around. And then the devs never come back to cut the fat.
A friend of mine joked that 32GB of RAM was the new minimum standard, and someone else took a step further to say that disk I/O is the new RAM. We're still quite a ways away from that, but we're still trending in that direction.
Edit: This isn't to say that we'll be using disk I/O as RAM. It's a hyperbole, but there's no denying that it's now acceptable to ignore memory footprint of desktop apps.
Well, with the SSDs in them approaching 3,000MB/sec reads, it's probably faster than RAM from a few generations ago. Can't wait for desktops to fully embrace PCIE SSDs, I'm talking like 6 slots for them + the PCIE lanes required to read them all at full speed. Hopefully Zen will get us closer.
Edit: ooh, and shared HBM2 memory between the CPU and GPU. And make it socketed + upgradable :)
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I think general public does care. Every couple of years, people lament the lack of speed that their laptops have. All of your programs are beefy, because people want quick turn around. And then the devs never come back to cut the fat.
A friend of mine joked that 32GB of RAM was the new minimum standard, and someone else took a step further to say that disk I/O is the new RAM. We're still quite a ways away from that, but we're still trending in that direction.
Edit: This isn't to say that we'll be using disk I/O as RAM. It's a hyperbole, but there's no denying that it's now acceptable to ignore memory footprint of desktop apps.
If you try to run OSX on a machine with a magnetic drive, you'll see that this is the case now. :/
To make it clear, my Mac Mini was performant about three major OS releases ago, and went to crap after an OS upgrade, so it's not the hardware.
Well, with the SSDs in them approaching 3,000MB/sec reads, it's probably faster than RAM from a few generations ago. Can't wait for desktops to fully embrace PCIE SSDs, I'm talking like 6 slots for them + the PCIE lanes required to read them all at full speed. Hopefully Zen will get us closer.
Edit: ooh, and shared HBM2 memory between the CPU and GPU. And make it socketed + upgradable :)