Doubling of computer power is underestimated

In an artical call Software Progress Beats Moore’s Law in the NY Times talk about how the software evolve much faster than Moore's Law. As a game programmer I can testify to this to be true. If you look at the original software release in consoles verses the newest games you really see how much more powerful the latest games are. yet the hardware has not change at all. In fact this is what makes consoles so nice to develop for. But software improvements are clearly visible as programmers really learn to take advantage of the hardware. But not just learning how to use the hardware better but also the fact that the underlaying algorithms which operate the games get better as well.

In game development there is a concept call virtualization... well actually I am not sure is a standard concept or is just my concept. Basically is the fact that you operate with data which does not exist, or saying it differently that you deal with data as it did exist, but it really does not. This concept could be use in things like sparse voxel trees, or how we did it in Area 51 collision spaces. In parallel programming this is taken a step farther by thinking that the data not only exists but it is also changing. Not only changing but changing in all frequencies and in all values. Whether it actually is happening or not is usually irrelevant to the algorithms.

With concepts as strange at those makes the hardware evolution looks like a turtle. What give the big advantage to software evolution is that it is all virtual. There is no need to create any physical object which involves dealing with factories etc. Also unlike the hardware the software have allot of bug or saying differently is more imperfect. This also is an advantage of the software because it can allocate resources where is needed the most.