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The future of computing: a conversation with John Hennessy (Google I/O '18)
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.You're correct that specialised analog companies have not done well historically. However, we don't find ourselves in exactly the same position in computer architecture/performance as we've been decades before.There's some (relatively) new ideas that now the performance of computers will be pushed more by dedicated silicon for a dedicated purpose, and tools. See for example there's plenty of room at the top [1], or Hennesy's talk at Google [2].
This of course does not mean that analog computers are suddenly viable, but it does mean that they could potentially fill a niche where they failed previously.
Anecdotally, when looking at jobs for hardware design by the likes of Infineon, STM, Cyient etc. there seems to be a relatively high ask for (senior) analog designers, and a new focus on mixed-technology chips. It might turn out to be a dud still, but it isn't the same situation as decades before.
1: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aam9744 , or the IEEE article https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7863324
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azt8Nc-mtKM , around the 12:15 mark, but the entire video is relevant.
I'm not sure. I see so much money being poured into making scripting languages faster [0], and with the "End of Moores Law" in sight I feel like the industry is going to be leaning towards static languages [1].Perhaps developments in gradual typing will allow for the benefits of quick and experimental development (scripting) that can later be calcified into a sturdy fully-typed program with higher performance (through optimized AOT compilation).
[0] https://instagram-engineering.com/dismissing-python-garbage-...
⬐ zzzcpanAOT compilation doesn't really solve the problem. You also need to get closer to the metal with the language, data types, algorithms, only then you can get significant performance increase. But this only postpones the problem, hardware is still capped by the end of Moore's law and will push you into concurrency and distributed systems sooner or later. And which language does it better will be an important factor.