| It's been a trend for years that we'll have more general purpose CPUs augmented with specialized hardware acceleration units in one single unit, e.g., * Intel/AMD CPUs merged with GPUs; * ARM mobile cores merged with GPUs, GPS, Gyro sensors, voice processors, finger print processors, etc.; * ARM CPU with FPGA (Xilinx Zync, Altera SoC FPGA). Their architectures are usually CPU-central, such that the CPU speed and memory bandwidth are the main bottlenecks. For the Intel+Altera merage, I'd like to see them come up with architecture innovations from another perspective: * Programmable logics and signal fabrics (bus) connecting general purpose CPUs and hardware acceleration units; * Bandwidth and connections central, like the Internet, massive processing power comes from massive intelligent connected simple individual nodes (CPU/modules); * Programming such architecture is more resemble how human brain works (reconfigurable inter-connects of neurons). |