Gaming pioneer John Carmack believes we’re not nearly as dependent on cutting-edge silicon as most assume — we just lack the economic incentive to prove it. Responding to a “CPU apocalypse” thought experiment on X, the id Software founder and former Oculus CTO suggested that software inefficiency, not hardware limitations, is our greatest vulnerability. “More of the world than many might imagine could run on outdated hardware if software optimization was truly a priority,” Carmack wrote, arguing that market pressures would drive dramatic efficiency improvements if new chips stopped arriving.
His solution? “Rebuild all the interpreted microservice based products into monolithic native codebases!” — essentially abandoning modern development patterns for the more efficient approaches of earlier computing eras. The veteran programmer noted that such changes would come with significant tradeoffs: “Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute.”
