The Era of General Purpose Computers Is Ending

Neil Thompson Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and A.I. Lab and a Visiting Professor at Harvard, and Svenja Spanuth, a graduate student from RWTH Aachen University, contend what we have been covering here at The Next Platform all along;  that the disintegration of Moore’s Law, along with new applications like deep learning and cryptocurrency mining, are driving the industry away from general-purpose microprocessors and toward a model that favors specialized microprocessor. But the authors believe the real watershed moment for the industry is being enabled by deep learning, an application category that cuts across nearly every computing environment – mobile, desktop, embedded, cloud, and supercomputing. Deep learning and its preferred hardware platform, GPUs, represent the most visible example of how computing may travel down the path from general-purpose to specialized processors.

Source: www.nextplatform.com