Major changes will include the introduction of more 3D packaging, which among others probably means much larger caches. I wouldn't be shocked if last level cach

Major changes will include the introduction of more 3D packaging, which among others probably means much larger caches. I wouldn't be shocked if last level caches reached, say, half a gigabyte or more, if things go well, though it could certainly not go that well. Depending on how much companies try to milk servers, we should see commoditization of large and fast non-volatile memories. This has many impacts; we might see laptops with hundreds of GB of effective RAM, and filesystems, with appropriate software to handle it, when run from these devices should approach the performance of in-memory data structures. Cores themselves will probably be a fair bit wider, but struggle even more than they currently do to utilize their full throughput. Typical programs will run faster mostly because of the increased cache size and (potentially) vastly faster IO; optimized programs will benefit more from the actual throughput increase. Hopefully chips will have continued increasing their core counts—it's certainly possible, if the will is there. Programmers will follow through after a delay; programming for parallelism is only done when cores are numerous. I could imagine 8 core 24 thread being fairly standard, for instance. GPUs will just continue to get better, as density and memory and packaging allows them to do so. Neural network accelerators will be a lot better than today, and will very much appreciate the larger, faster memories that the future offers. The x86 tax continues to grow as competition from Apple's CPUs (though not necessarily direct competition) results in cores wider than x86 can handle without more and more caching and other expensive optimizations. Mill Computing finally start work on their FPGA.