The Future Yet Again….

I have been trying really hard to write something for the past few days. It is almost like the creative side of me was killed by a big “VLSI storm” that hit us some time last week. It took me almost a week to get my act together. The VLSI storm was an eye opener of sorts. It made me realize that I can be extremely painful at times. I was getting to painful to be around me, even I couldn’t stand myself anymore. Okay, enough of retrospection. I don’t wanna talk about that.

I was reading this blog article by Gene Frantz, where he talked about the future of processors. What he and his team of elite scientists in Texas Instruments imagine would be the architecture of future processors. It is easy to look at the present state of affairs and extrapolate the future in the next few years, but seeing beyond three to four years is a real challenge and Gene Frantz and his team tried to do exactly that. His original article can be found here. Even though this article seems very interesting, it is almost like Gene and his team just extrapolated a line with 2 data points.

In my opinion, things change drastically only once every five or six years.(What, you don’t believe me!! look at your own career graphs). Taking this into consideration, we only have time for two drastic changes till 2020. With reduced cycle times, everyone will just reuse IPs, you don’t need to be a visionary to quote that, but what components will be reusable and what will be built from scratch is the question. Honestly, I cannot think beyond a multiplier block to be reused across SOCs.

Innovation is software is probably going to change the world, but for that we need a world where almost all processors that we might buy of the shelf are exactly identical(and capable :)). Fortunately for us, the world is heading in that direction.

If Pranav Mistry has his way, we will all be walking around wearing a camera and a projector around our necks and looking ridiculous. The Pico projector technology can come to our rescue here, and we all might actually be carrying phones with these projectors and cameras.

Okay, I really cannot imagine what the future is going to be like, Imaginative people can email me their ideas and i can pass them off as my own