Molten salt solar power plants are completely obsolete. See for ex. Ivanpah being shut down early because the power its generating is too expensive compared to Solar PV: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/once-an-engineeri...

People repeat this line a lot but I don’t think it’s true. Companies like Intel, AMD, Arm, Broadcom, etc. afaik all pay their software folks of equivalent YoE or level roughly the same as their hardware folks. To the extent there’s any difference, it’s much less than 25%.

OTOH, there’s a small slice of (mainly) software companies like Google and Meta, along with Unicorn private companies, that skew the average software engineer salary high. Then there’s a long tail of “old school” hardware companies like TI, Motorola, Atmel, Microchip, and tons of smaller less well known companies that all pay much lower than Google. But they pay their software people poorly as well.

So if you just look at “average software engineer salary” vs “average hardware engineer salary” it appears that SW people are making 50% more than HW people, but it’s not at the same companies.

The latter is now an optional feature in the mainstream Arm ISA now (FEAT_FlagM and FEAT_FlagM2). Similarly the “alternate floating point mode” that Apple uses to match nuances of x86 FP semantics is a standard architectural feature as well. The TSO option though is Apples own thing.