Hardware-based efficiency stuff seems to be the future.
This whole idea that we need light and simple software to be fast doesn't quite we need software that takes fullest advantage of hardware.
I bet we could do a lot more with this idea. We could have dozens of tiny cores, without any math beyond addition, for things like regexes and file format parsing.
We could probably fit stuff like small AIs and video codecs on SD sized accelerator chips if we really tried.
It will be cool to see how far they can take this.
It will also be really cool to see how we program for this kind of thing, to really make the best use of it.
I think network stuff is probably another one. You don't need any floating point or even very much cache to send 50 encrypted copies of a packet down 50 pipes, and handle some basic connection upkeep business.
Moore's law is dead for the purposes of ever-faster sequential processing that happens only in software, so it makes sense. We need parallel processing, or purpose-built hardware blocks that can efficiently do certain types of tasks.
I'm guessing it will probably be more like large complicated libraries, just like now, that have 8 different implementations for different chips, heuristics for what is worth doing on GPU, etc.
This whole idea that we need light and simple software to be fast doesn't quite we need software that takes fullest advantage of hardware.
I bet we could do a lot more with this idea. We could have dozens of tiny cores, without any math beyond addition, for things like regexes and file format parsing.
We could probably fit stuff like small AIs and video codecs on SD sized accelerator chips if we really tried.
It will be cool to see how far they can take this.
It will also be really cool to see how we program for this kind of thing, to really make the best use of it.