Ask HN: What are the next steps regarding processors technology?
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? 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! Next couple of generations will still be "shrinking stuff", after that it will be "new stuff" (e.g. graphene) and "stacking stuff" (3D integration). 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. 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... Have any of you here looked into neuromorphic computing and Spiky Neural Networks? Do these show any promise?