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Comment by arbuge | Hacker News Reader

TL:DR; Moore's law can no longer be counted on for performance gains, so speeding up things will now be dependent on replacing general purpose hardware with hardware specifically designed to implement specific algorithms.

Of course work on custom chips has been going on as long as chips were a thing. The article just underlines that this is now pretty much the only way forward.

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> this is now pretty much the only way forward

That, and optimizing the software we use. There is so much bloatware, so much technical debt collected in incremental improvements over decades, that we could get a decent speed boost from optimizing on it.

Aren't optical transistors another option though?

>Aren't optical transistors another option though?

It will be a minimum of a couple more decades of research and hundreds of billions of dollars of retooling before any of the potential replacements for silicon surpass what currently exists now at the current price and volume of mass production.

Optical switches are extremely large compared to contemporary transistors, and there's no obvious way to scale them smaller than the diffraction limit.

Hopefully this kind of problem will be solved within a decade, do you think that's a reasonable time scale or is this problem even unsolvable?

Like all research into the unknown it might prove easy (5-10 years) it might prove hard (20 years) it might always be 50 years away (hehe fusion) or it might just not be possible (faster than light travel).

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