My take on what it will mean: (1) It will now make sense to invest in the development of higher-order compute architectures that take advantage of truly massiv

My take on what it will mean: (1) It will now make sense to invest in the development of higher-order compute architectures that take advantage of truly massive parallelism. In the past such efforts (connection machine, etc.) were killed by Moore's Law-- by the time they hit the street CPUs had already gotten so much faster their advantage had disappeared. (2) It will also make sense to prioritize parallelism in software to a much greater degree than it has been historically. (3) "Software Moore's Law" type efforts will get a huge boost. In the past we've almost had an "Eroom's Law" in software: it bloats in proportion to faster chips and more RAM. Expect to see performance in software become a real feature. (I think we're already seeing this.) (4) Slow languages will become considerably less shiny. Fast languages that take good ideas from slower dynamic languages like Rust, Go, Swift, etc. will become much shiner. C/C++ might also see a renaissance in mainstream interest. (This is already happening.) (5) Once fabs all catch up to the state of the art endpoint fab tech for conventional chips, silicon fabrication will become a commodity service subject to commodity market forces. It will get cheap. This will accelerate even more as patents expire (or China ignores them). (6) China (and specifically the Shenzhen ecosystem) has a very good chance of eating semiconductors due to #5. Nobody does manufacturing scale like the Chinese and once they catch up they'll own it unless players like Intel get serious about getting ahead of this. (7) Also due to #5, the price per unit of compute may continue to fall for some time after Moore's Law hits the wall -- and partly because Moore's Law has hit the wall. Something akin to the current top-end Xeon could easily cost under $20 in 10-15 years. Smallish ARM chips could be priced by weight like a building material. (8) As a consequence of #7, we might see what I call "Moore's Mushroom" -- a geometric fall in the price of massively parallel machines (also see #1). If the equivalent of a 48-core Xeon is $20, then a 1200-core monster might cost under $1000. For $10k you'd be able to buy your own equivalent of a decently sized data center. (9) Power efficiency of chips may continue to improve for a while to the extent that this can be pursued without increasing density, and it might make sense to make this a huge priority once density is stable. Power/compute might still have a ways to go. (10) As a consequence of #5, open source core designs will really hit the mainstream. You'll be able to take an open reference chip design and have it fabbed by the lowest bidder. "White label" OSS chips will appear. (11) Finally, also due to #5 ASICs will get cheaper to make. Expect to see more of them, especially since it will now make sense to make an ASIC to speed up an algorithm as you can no longer just wait on Moore's Law to give you that speed for free. You'll see AI ASICs, crypto ASICs, graphics ASICS, data compression ASICs, even language specific 'accelerator' ASICs like JavaScript coprocessors, etc. With OSS core chip designs these could easily get bolted on, leading to weird custom cores like a "JavaScript optimized OpenRISC white label CPU." (12) It might still be possible to push single-threaded performance by improving cooling, e.g. by mainstreaming liquid or active refrigerated cooling. The current overclocking record for cryogenically cooled Xeons is around 6.2ghz. Will we see liquid nitrogen in data centers as a common thing? (13) The PC and mobile device upgrade cycle will slow a lot, which will further kill profits in hardware all the way up the stack. Hardware's about to become a hard business. TL;DR: price/compute and power/compute will continue to improve for a while; semiconductor margins will get squeezed; software efficiency will matter more; ASICs will get more common; open source chips might finally arrive. All of this might actually be good for Silicon Valley, which mostly does software not hardware. Software's about to get even more important.