Comment by protomok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by protomok | Hacker News Reader

The chemical, wetware, fluid and ternary computing concepts mentioned in the article I guess make for a good headline but seem highly unlikely.

In the short term I really think we are entering the era of accelerators. Accelerators like Micron's Automata Processor (1) for graph analysis, accelerators for compute intensive applications like Convolutional Neural Nets, continued innovation in DSPs, GPUs, etc.

Accelerators that can either outperform traditional processors or use significantly less power I think represent one of the major next steps after Moore's law. What comes next may well be a slime mold computer but I think at this point is pure speculation.

(1) - http://www.micronautomata.com - actually I heard about this on HN!

Yes, almost certainly the next phase for performance-intensive computing is more specialized chips, systems-on-a-chip, and whole specialized rigs. The TensorFlow Processing Unit is a good recent example of this, as are ASICs in bitcoin mining, specialized hardware in molecular biology simulation, and more examples. This is just the beginning.

I think the interesting question is what happens after that. Not too long from now, specialized systems will run up against the same physical limits that general purpose processors have begun to hit the past few years as well, as specialized fabs increase in capability and sophistication. We see this already with GPUs.

Specialization is essentially trading off additional hardware design work--and additional software complexity--for performance. When Moore's Law was going strong, it usually didn't make sense; just wait a couple years and the next x86 generation will probably more or less catch up to whatever performance gains your specialization was going to buy you.

I think it's pretty clear that we're going to see the introduction of all sorts of specialized hardware that we already more or less know how to do but it just hasn't been worth the trouble before. But you're also right that, so long as we're still talking CMOS, this is probably a more or less one-time boost that's maybe worth a few CMOS generations depending on the specific case.

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