First, the development of software depends on the chip. If the chip has limited processing power, people will not develop a high-load software to run on the chip. For example, in the early days of the advent of smartphones, the load-bearing chip computing capacity is very limited, can only assume the call and basic entertainment activities, if the game manufacturers do not consider chip performance, the development of a high-definition quality, real-time rendering of 3D games, will inevitably because of the user experience is very poor and eliminated. In 2007, Vista was officially sold to ordinary users, but because most of the family's computers were unable to support the operation of the Vista system smoothly, they did not want to buy an expensive computer for a different operating system, which led to Vista's promotion and its frustrations. Although Vista has made milestone progress compared to XP, it has not been well-developed by the user chip, and Windows 7 after a few years has created brilliance.
Second, the development of chips depends on the needs of software. If the software does not have a higher demand for the processing power of the chip, the chip makers will not invest money to develop new chips. For example, in a small embedded device (such as a rice cooker), the software may only need to complete the countdown function, in order to develop a 24-core 48-thread Xeon processor, and then use the 2560-stream processor GTX1080 to control the time display "rendering", it is obviously ridiculous.
In general, the development of software and chips complements each other, promotes and develops together. The development of software requires higher computing power of the chip, and the development of the chip needs the higher computing demand of the software. We are most familiar with the development of the game, the 80 's FC games swept the world, but because of the limited processing capacity of the chip, only the use of rough picture quality and very limited game content, but the player's demand for the game to promote the manufacturers to develop better chips and games, even today, the PC can run many large games, But people still have a higher demand for the game experience. Therefore, the mutual promotion and common development of software and chips will continue.
Blog Editor: Liu Kai
Topic 11: What are the interdependent and mutually stimulating relationships between the development of software and chips? Can you give me an example?