It is not that I disagree with Hennessy, but I think it is premature to conclude that general-purpose processors have reached the end of the road. There is a he

It is not that I disagree with Hennessy, but I think it is premature to conclude that general-purpose processors have reached the end of the road. There is a healthy middle in between specialized and general-purpose design. Exploiting that middle is what I think will deliver the next generation of growth. That is exactly what naturally occurred with SoC and mobile design. The raw computational capabilities of the TPU don't really prove anything. Of course co-design wins. Whether it is vison or NLP -- NN training has dominant characteristics. The arithmetic is known: GeMM. The control is known: SGD. Tailoring control and memory-hierarchy to this is a no-brainer and of course the economic incentives at Google push them in this direction and of course the expertise available at Google powered this success. For other applications it is not so clear. Finding similar dominance in other applications is trickier. To accelerate an application with a specialized architecture you need dominating characteristics in the apps memory-access, computational, and control profiles.