No shit. We're using a computer architecture envisioned in the late 50s. Our main processing units are made by a near-monopoly. The situation is so bad that to

No shit. We're using a computer architecture envisioned in the late 50s. Our main processing units are made by a near-monopoly. The situation is so bad that to do any real computing we need to put another computer (GPU) inside of our computer. If you think about it, it's patently absurd. As far as grand new ideas: fleet architecture by Ivan Sutherland. As far as master-of-the-obvious ideas: make a hybrid unit that contains flash, RAM and an FPGa-based processor. Persistent by default. Connect a lot of them and get rid of disks, caches and memory bottlenecks. Do something similar to what XMOS does for peripherals (simulate them) to simplify hardware even further. You could even combine the two ideas above. Make a computer where programming isn't just about instructions, but about re-configuring hardware and information routing within the system.