Basically, with Moore's Law coming to the asymptote of its sigmoid, we're turning the Wheel of Reincarnation again towards specialized domain-specific hardware

Basically, with Moore's Law coming to the asymptote of its sigmoid, we're turning the Wheel of Reincarnation again towards specialized domain-specific hardware (http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.ht...) and software systems distributed over multiple specialized pieces of hardware. Since I work somewhere that basically makes custom ASICs, this is very nice for us and our ecosystem. >(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." There are a couple of intermediate steps here: 9') FPGAs are pushed to get cheaper and more powerful. 10') Tooling improves drastically for FPGAs and ASIC development. Currently, that tooling is decades behind software development. 10'') A combination of 9' and 10' enables a thriving ecosystem of writing algorithms in hardware, sharing the hardware designs around, and everyone deploying to racks of FPGAs when they can't afford full-blown ASIC production.