The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

The title made me think Carmack was criticizing poorly optimized software and advocating for improving performance on old hardware.

When in fact, the tweet is absolutely not about either of the two. He's talking about a thought experiment where hardware stopped advancing and concludes with "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course".

> "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course".

Interesting conclusion—I'd argue we haven't seen much innovation since the smartphone (18 years ago now), and it's entirely because capital is relying on the advances of hardware to sell what is to consumers essentially the same product that they already have.

Of course, I can't read anything past the first tweet.

We have self driving cars, amazing advancement in computer graphics, dead reckoning of camera position from visual input...

In the meantime, hardware has had to go wide on threads as single core performance has not improved. You could argue that's been a software gain and a hardware failure.