Hardware vs Software Innovation (Part 5) | Omni Business Solutions

Hardware vs Software Innovation (Part 5) | OBS

Milo Alexsander: When it comes to engineers all creators in the hardware field, there must be fewer compared to engineers in the software field.

Jaffar Almusaad: Yes, not even 1:1000 ration I think. Designing #hardware is a very complex process. Just think, I have a background in computer architecture - I actually love it. I used to develop software using assembly language just for fun. So, understanding the hardware designing and innovating in this area is very complex. Just think of the caching - in GPU performance, cached memory needs to be properly utilised - there are 20 or even 30 different ways and they are all incorporated into the #microprocessors you see today. When they first innovated, the innovation was simple. But then you exhaust your simple innovations and simple #solutions. Hence now you have to come up with more complex solutions and I think that that’s the issue with hardware now - you need to introduce very complex #innovations just to make very small improvements to the overall performance.
On the other hand, on the software side, I think the limit is the sky.

Milo Alexsander: That might be another reason why there’s more of an emphasis on the #software because #customers and everyday people are buying things in the form of software and if you’re having more developers and more customers to sell the software to, you can get a much larger return. Whereas with hardware, let’s look at the TPU as an example, one box of driverless technology can cost a considerable amount of money. But then if you have a software developed by an engineer who makes the software usable and successful, it can be sold to a 100 million users at a reasonable cost. Considering that would it maybe be better to focus on the software side of innovation? Would that be a reasonable observation?

Jaffar Almusaad: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. The hardware is something very specific and does very specific things, whereas with software you have the flexibility. Also, as individuals and small software companies we can only play with the software and it is cost-effective. It is not feasible for smaller companies to compete with the likes of Intel, #Nvidia and the rest of the big players when it comes to hardware. It’s just not feasible.

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