Is the overhead in software development greater today. Assembly language #programming is still relevant.
What the hell is this? Obviously performance matters, if you're going to write a full length article about it, why not offer some insight? Nothing of consequence is said here.
No you did not. You multiplied some meaningless numbers together. Not only is there no basis for these numbers, but they are ludicrous estimates as well. Do you really think any professionally written software would have an overhead even CLOSE to 100 times larger than actual processing time?
What are your core competencies when it comes to computer programming or software engineering? You've got to be an assembly language or a c programmer to readily perceive the analysis. If you wrote computer programs before 1999 this fact wouldn't be lost on you. The same is true for game developers or other performance critical devepors today. Take time to read the article or blog publication carefully and do some research; talk to some more people. What do you understand by processor speed of 3.5 gigahertz? Some years ago the best you could get was 66megahertz.
As a matter of fact, writing C and assembler is what I've been doing the past two years. Indeed I'd just graduated before then, so my experience is still limited. However, I've optimised plenty of code. Going from C to assembler, I seem to remember cutting down processing time by half, or something around that range. Maybe a bit more in some cases. That's one or two orders of magnitude below what you suggest. Honestly though, my criticism isn't so much with the numbers as it is with the content of the article. I felt like you spent a lot of time taking about trivialities and hearsay, and not much time developing your argument with facts. Yes, speed (obviously) matters, power consumption (obviously) matters, and latency (obviously) matters. No one in their right mind would say otherwise. However, so does development time, portability and maintainability. Not all software needs to be written in assembler. Maybe I'm not the target audience for this article. Still, I feel like you wrote a lot of words to say very little. I'll admit I was rather hostile in my response, and I'm sorry that I was so aggressive. I was simply disappointed with the article.