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

6 points by romgrk 7 years ago | 5 comments

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?

thedevindevops 7 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 7 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 7 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 7 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 7 years ago | |

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