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Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

Your making the same assumption people made about computing in the 50s, then 70s, then 90s, etc.

Please do elaborate. I try to base my assumptions (which I accept may turn out to be completely wrong) on physics and experience in working in semiconductors.

I just don't see a 1000x+ decrease in the power required happening in a decade or two without some revolutionary technology I can't even imagine. Is this what you meant? I'm sure most people couldn't imagine modern silicon chips in the 1950s vacuum tube era. But now we're getting close to the theoretical, well-understood minimums in silicon chips, so another revolutionary step is required if another giant leap like that is to be achieved.

    > physics and experience in working in semiconductors

    > without some revolutionary technology I can't even
    > imagine

I suspect (in the nicest possible way) that in a lineup of your imagination (on current assumptions) vs the combined ingenuiety of the human race driven by the hidden hand, the latter wins.

> > Give it ten years and […]

> I find this overly optimistic

exDM69 never said it's not gonna happen, he just said that it's not going to happen in ten years, and I agree with him. Revolutions never occurs that quickly. To achieve that we don't just need an improvement of the current state of the art, we need a massive change and we don't even know what it's going to look like yet ! This kind of revolution may occur one day but not in ten year.

And it could even never happen, remember that we don't have flying cars yet ;)

The thing is though we could already be 10+ years along the path to that next revolution, it wont start being talked about until its basically here

It seems to me that the people who say "it won't happen" do tend to have a much better reason to say it won't happen (or rather that it _probably_ won't happen) than the people who insist the next big revolution is just round the corner just because the last big revolution did happen.

The optimistic position is a bit like saying: "I 've lived 113 years, I'm not going to die now!". It's entirely possible for a trend to reverse itself. If machine learning has taught us something is that background knowledge (in this case, of processor technology) gives you much better results than just guessing based on what happened in the past.

Here's some possibilities:

Stacked 3D chips (HBM, etc), Heterogenous computing (OpenCL, Vulkan), Optical computing, Memristors, Graphene-based microchips, Superconductors, Spintronics, Quantum computers, Genetic computers (self-reconfigurable)

Heterogenous computing is already used in AlphaGo (and your smartphone). 3d chips will come to mainstream devices in a few years, but will give "only" a modest performance boost, say 2x or so.

The rest of the technologies you mention have great potential but will they be available in a smartphone in one decade? I don't think so.

You might ultimately only need some specialized "neural processing instruction set" for either the GPU cores or for the CPU cores. Or at least, I don't see any obvious obstacles to that.

I feel the same way about the chips reaching their physical limits. But I keep waiting for a new way we use them. We used to just churn out MHz and that was the metric. Then we got hyper-threading, multi-cores, GPU and other specific processors and new ways of programming to go with it all. I imagine we'll see the same. Just like the brain has different areas of processing, I'm hoping we'll see the same in silicon chips. Just like how we offload work from the general purpose cpu to the more efficient purpose build gpu or sound card etcs. Not saying every computer is going to have a GO chip in it, but maybe someday we'll have machine learning processors or who knows what. But yeah the advancements will be new designs and new ways of processing instead of more power.

Sure. But so far, we've found that revolutionary step every time we've hit these sorts of walls, and if I was a betting man I'd wager we'll do the same again.

Right, but just as a contrast: Technological progress speed has been at an all-time high since the begin of the industrial revolution.

It might as well slow down again and we have to remember that most humans in history saw little to no advances in technology over their lifetime.

I'm excited for the possibilities modern science opens up but I also think we might reach a point where fundamental progress stalls for a century or two.

I guess free worldwide information transfer (aka Internet) just opened this era and we are not close to see any kind of stalling (IMHO).

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