Google researcher and reverse engineer "LaurieWired" recently published a thought-provoking post on X: What will happen after the CPU manufacturing apocalypse? How will the tech world cope with a future without newer, faster processors? John Carmack, a legend in programming and optimization, gave an equally compelling answer.
Laurie Wired proposed the concept of "Zero Tape Day" (Z-Day), a day when manufacturers stop producing new silicon designs. Given existing supplies, researchers predict that skyrocketing computer prices, stagnant cloud computing capacity, and increasing e-migration will slowly degrade the performance of state-of-the-art chips built on smaller nodes—all within the first year after Z-Day.
Over the next few years, the situation would worsen, with a thriving black market in processors and high-performance computing power worth more than gold. Computing technology could be set back decades as older systems built on larger nodes prove more resistant to electromigration.
People would modify classic processors like the Motorola 68000 so that they could run for thousands of years without serious gate-level wear and tear. More advanced systems—such as the iMac G3 sold between 1998 and 2003—would become the workstations of the elite, while the common man would use older hardware like the Gameboy, Macintosh SE, and Commodore 64.
LaurieWired believes that 30 years after Z-Day, the world will become a dystopia, where computer systems will resemble those of the 1970s and 1980s. The modern internet will cease to exist, replaced by “Stalker Network” data exchange on solid-state drives (SSDs) and efforts to protect valuable desktop hardware from confiscation.
Former id Software developer John Carmack decided to participate in this thought experiment. His expertise in developing the Doom graphics engine in just 28 hours on "vintage hardware" provides some perspective. Carmack said that if software optimization was a priority for developers, then a large part of the modern world could run on outdated hardware.
The “god” programmer suggested that developers migrate all interpreted microservices-based products to a monolithic native code base. Programmers will abandon modern development models and seek more efficient methods, such as those used in the early days of computing (when there was no Internet to push patches).
This paradigm reset will force post-apocalyptic programmers to make ancient hardware work again through software optimization. Carmack also acknowledged that without ultra-low-cost and scalable computing technology, innovative new products will become more scarce.
Although Carmack's ideas were based on Laurie Wired's thought experiments, his ideas are still relevant in today's computing world. For example, if Microsoft prioritizes optimizing Windows 11, will it also impose strict hardware requirements? This is a question worth thinking about. Likewise, how much benefit could better optimization bring to the gaming industry?