> We do mean that the economic cycle that has led to the usage of a common computing platform, underpinned by rapidly improving universal processors, is giving way to a fragmentary cycle, where economics push users toward divergent computing platforms driven by special purpose processors.
computing in my view is rapidly subliming away into the cloud. whether users will have much computer at all in front of them is questionable, or perhaps semi-vestigial. work/applications are headed into data centers. want photoshop today? even the old-fashioned install & run it yourself version has major cloud connectivity.
even within the world.of.consumer electronics, I don't see specialization as a trend. video game consoles have tended towards "exactly like a pc" over time. cell phones are pc's with the most proprietary/controlled drivers on the planet. 5g base stations are pc software-defined-networks plus gobs of general purpose dsps/sdrs. in the smaller computing/devuce world, arm and espressif and soon risc-v are cutting out larger & larger swarths.
thus far ai processors have had fairly wide ability to operate models in a cross-architecyure fashion. make sure you can run onnx or tf-lite. big only marginally customized gpus still have a huge presence. there is variety here but remarkably little end user differentiation.
where are the specialized systems this write up talks to? where are the fragmented systems? the door is opening as we try to re-learn how to make silicon foundries, how to do open source chip making, but I haven't seen what's being talked about here, specialization, bifurcation of capabilities.
but cloud? cloud is murdering the shit out of general purpose computing. applicationization of software turns software effectively hard to end users. we have no power, no ability to adapt or change or see the computing. it's 100% what is given to us. every system is 100% special/specialized, and in the post Pax Intertwingularis death of the api & interoperability, that means radical rigidity. systems are radically more specialized & in&general, but it's not a hardware problem like this paper asserts and it's not something on thebhorizon: it's already happened, it's already made the general.purpose computer obsolete, and it's at the software level, it's about where most of the world's computing is run, on special systems, on the clouds.
computing in my view is rapidly subliming away into the cloud. whether users will have much computer at all in front of them is questionable, or perhaps semi-vestigial. work/applications are headed into data centers. want photoshop today? even the old-fashioned install & run it yourself version has major cloud connectivity.
even within the world.of.consumer electronics, I don't see specialization as a trend. video game consoles have tended towards "exactly like a pc" over time. cell phones are pc's with the most proprietary/controlled drivers on the planet. 5g base stations are pc software-defined-networks plus gobs of general purpose dsps/sdrs. in the smaller computing/devuce world, arm and espressif and soon risc-v are cutting out larger & larger swarths.
thus far ai processors have had fairly wide ability to operate models in a cross-architecyure fashion. make sure you can run onnx or tf-lite. big only marginally customized gpus still have a huge presence. there is variety here but remarkably little end user differentiation.
where are the specialized systems this write up talks to? where are the fragmented systems? the door is opening as we try to re-learn how to make silicon foundries, how to do open source chip making, but I haven't seen what's being talked about here, specialization, bifurcation of capabilities.
but cloud? cloud is murdering the shit out of general purpose computing. applicationization of software turns software effectively hard to end users. we have no power, no ability to adapt or change or see the computing. it's 100% what is given to us. every system is 100% special/specialized, and in the post Pax Intertwingularis death of the api & interoperability, that means radical rigidity. systems are radically more specialized & in&general, but it's not a hardware problem like this paper asserts and it's not something on thebhorizon: it's already happened, it's already made the general.purpose computer obsolete, and it's at the software level, it's about where most of the world's computing is run, on special systems, on the clouds.