Enterprise Datacenter Hardware Assumptions May Be In For a Shakeup (acm.org)

For the entire careers of most practicing computer scientists, a fundamental observation has consistently held true: CPUs are significantly more performant and more expensive than I/O devices. The fact that CPUs can process data at extremely high rates, while simultaneously servicing multiple I/O devices, has had a sweeping impact on the design of both hardware and software for systems of all sizes, for pretty much as long as we've been building them. This assumption, however, is in the process of being completely invalidated.

Comments

Re:You say performant, I say performance...

[Captain Splendid]

Language is a tool. Just because you're not versed in its intricacies doesn't mean that someone who is is inferior to you.

Performant does not (necessarily) mean "faster"

[SuperKendall]

Performant is actually a pretty useful word in place of "real" ones like "faster", because "performance" is a word that can change meaning depending on what you consider to be good (or desired) performance.

Maybe good performance means that it's using all of the cores on a CPU well. maybe it means that it's not using much of the system at all, but is using the network very well, or work is spread out across a cluster in an extremely balanced fashion. "Faster" may be a by-product, but it may not, because people using the word "performant" often value stability over absolute speed.

I guess the closest concept "performant" comes to is being well-balanced, or perhaps meeting some goal you had set during design.

So don't be too dismissive of a new word, it can be the case a new word was made because old ones wouldn't really fit without a lot of verbosity.