It was screaming fast! We went from a discussion on how many colors a machine had, whether it flogged a speaker for sound, or had an actual sound system, to mu

It was screaming fast! We went from a discussion on how many colors a machine had, whether it flogged a speaker for sound, or had an actual sound system, to multi-media excellence, and it happened QUICK! I sure enjoyed my trip through those times. But, there may be more to come! Custom silicon is on it's way back around the computing circle of life. The way I see it, the different options we've seen hold fairly stable for a decade or so have all converged on similar ground. Differentiation is sometimes more contrived than actual, like the software, or form factor of a device, maybe it's ports, mean more than the actual computing potential it has. Additionally, we've somewhat peaked in terms of sequential compute, and things like multi-media are fairly ordinary, and of sufficient quality many don't see a big distinction between pro efforts and gear and consumer grade gear. Or, it just flat doesn't matter. And now the dam is breaking! To gain advantage, and also lock customers in, leverage mindshare and data, other investments users have or are making, custom silicon is looking very appealing now. On top of that, the bigger players have the resources to do the development, more of what people need to know about doing it is out there, and tools are more available now to the point where mere mortals can play in this game. A quick look at something relevant? Consider the Parallax Propeller 2 microcontroller chip. It's done on an older process, 130nm I believe. On that process, the creator and team managed to get an 8 core, 300Mhz plus design with a lot of features. That project took a decade or so, and north of a million. While high, that's not out of line compared to what it all was just a short time before. Chips are done, available for people to buy and build into projects / products. It's a custom design with particular emphasis on real time, parallel or concurrent programming, and data streaming, measurement with all I/O pins capable of analog or digital operation. For some applications nothing will come close. A great example of what can be done now. The bigger players have all done, or are working on custom silicon for one reason or another. AI, network, computation, etc... Soon, we are going to head back to something closer to that era. More highly differentiated devices / machines. Maybe there is room for the kind of work BYTE did in some form... But, whether that happens or not, we may well see custom silicon push things forward again in dramatic ways.