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Ask HN: What are the next steps regarding processors technology?

6 points| romgrk | 6 years ago

Given that Moore's law has come to an end and it's not doable to keep shrinking stuff, where will the next improvements regarding processors be made?

5 comments

thedevindevops|6 years ago

Optical Processors, FGPA 'reconfigurable hardware', 3d layering, Quantum processors (if they ever go commercial), Neurochips (rat-brain-neural-network-on-a-chip for specialist hardware applications). If hardware devs ever run out of ideas we may even have to go back to resource-efficient programming!

p1esk|6 years ago

Next couple of generations will still be "shrinking stuff", after that it will be "new stuff" (e.g. graphene) and "stacking stuff" (3D integration).

sgillen|6 years ago

Specialization. We're already seeing specialized processors take over niches of compute (Googles TPU, bitcoin ASICs, GPUs etc etc). I think we'll see this trend accelerate.

imakwana|6 years ago

2017 ACM Turing Award Lecture by Hennessy and Patterson nicely summarizes the emphasis on domain-specific languages and domain-specific architectures going forward. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/2/234352-a-new-golden-ag...

johnsimer|6 years ago

Have any of you here looked into neuromorphic computing and Spiky Neural Networks? Do these show any promise?