Architects Look to Processors of Future; 8/5/96

Many New Applications Will Emerge In 1947, the big idea (perhaps of all time) was the stored program computer that was soon to operate. In the same year, the transistor, a second and equally big idea, was invented. By the mid 1960s, a way of fabricating and interconnecting transistors on silicon substrates was invented and in use. The development of the microprocessor in 1971 ensured the evolution of computing would continue in a very focused fashion. The next 15–25 years look equally bright. The only form of intelligence more easily, cheaply, and rapidly fabricated is the human brain, estimated to have a processing power of around 1,000 million million ops/s (one petaops), with a memory of 10 terabytes [Cochrane, 1996]. For five decades, hardware has stimulated the evolution of computer platforms of various performance, size, cost, Architects Look to Pr Applications, Instruction Sets, Memory