I disagree with that statement. There is a need for faster CPU speeds. As systems become ever more complex, the programming platforms move to ever higher levels of abstraction so that the human mind can cope with the complexity. If all things were equal and we were writing the same applications then it would have been a valid point. But we are writing vastly more complicated applications these days. And we are writing them faster.

Matt Smith, London,

Too right, Name Withheld, perhaps it should be called sloppyware rather than software.

Kidd Garrett, Bristol, UK

When the limit of CPU power is reached we need to look into generating a multi-cpu computer to speed things up. Having multiple CPU's dedicated inside the computer to take the load off the main CPU and speed things up. I have already done this with my computer as I have the main CPU, with a Radeon GFX CPU so that it doesn't have to do the GFX work, and MPG Encoder/Decoder CPU dedicated to video work, and a SB X-Fi Sound Card which has it's own dedicated sound CPU to generate the Dolby Digital 5.1 sound taking the sound work off the CPU.

Darren Forster, Warrington, UK

This debate essentially boils down to economics: developer time vs cost of hardware. Right now, hardware is still cheaper, and this encourages sloppy programming. It might not be a bad thing if the cost of developing faster processors increases and redresses the balance a little between the two. It is a scandal - an absolute scandal - that, even with ever faster processors, software is getting progressively slower, because resource guzzlers such as .NET keep upping the cycles needed to do even the most basic operations. Each generation of coders is told: "no need to learn that old complex stuff; this new platform may be slower, but it's easier to code in and CPUs are getting faster all the time." Check out Visual Studio 2005. Its performance is an outrage. There's even an environmental aspect to all this - all this inefficient coding requiring faster processors means more energy consumption. The massive energy requirements of today's server farms are the result.

David Pritchard, Madrid, Spain

I actually agree with name withheld, my current pc is athlon 4600 x2, 2gb ram, 1 tb hd , 7900gt gfx , and yet at times it seems that it really isnt much faster than my childhood amiga 7mhz cpu, amiga o/s was more stable than xp too

the faster and more complex hardware gets, the less the software catches up, people really are writing rubbish code using visual studio using apis and objects of which no clue is given of the underlying code , resulting in vastly bloated and unstable executables .. bring back simplicity , bring back assembly language and rid users of c++/delphi/VB bloatware

Paul, Bournemouth , UK

Dear Name Witheld,

Sorry but it is a bit more complicated than you suggest.

Twenty years ago I wrote a realtime sonar display program running in 32kwords (64 KBytes) on a PDP11. Very nice code but I spent a lot of time optimising the code to run within the available resources. I had to be very aware of the computational resources I was using, the code was tied closely to the hardware.

These days I can write code that addresses far more complicated issues, that will run on Linux and on Windows. With users able to see the results by connecting over the web from anywhere in the world.

I, personnally, get more kick out of solving a difficult problem, than running on an antique processor. In the same way that I'm not looking to buy a vintage car; I just want reliable one that starts, stops and steers when I want it too.

Let's not over-romanticise antiques; they were the miracle of their time, but then the world moved on. I like mobile phones, digital TV and the internet

Paul, Exeter, Devon

There's no need for the speed of cpu's we have today even. The problem is that programmers have gotten sloppy. Look at how fast the C64 and Apple 2c were. They were lightening quick compared to today's applications. The reason was they only ran a few apps at a time and they were coded very tight. Today we attempt to mimic that by creating protected rooms of memory for the application but they don't work half as well as the computers of old and the programming is filled with junk created by visual programming. That is why Linux for example can do so much more with far less resources.

Name Withheld, somewhere, NE