Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The future sure sounds a lot like the past, given that everything, even toasters have CPU's in them these days.



http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html

We’re currently rolling around back to a new era of lots of specialized chips.


IDK, even in operations the size of the cloud providers, executing some of the same things billions of times a second, there's still very few specialized chips. TPU is an example, and I think they all use some for network packet filtering and such. But you don't see anything for DB acceleration or paxos acceleration or maps acceleration or anything like that. They've had years to figure this out, so if they're not finding it worth it at hypercompetitive cloud scale then I don't see the revolution going too awful far anytime soon.


Alibaba has been pushing the envelope pretty heavily in this area. I've heard of them using their FPGA instance for memcachedb instances, and video transcoding instances.


Toasters are moving back to ASICs too:

https://www.diodes.com/assets/Datasheets/PT8A2514A.pdf


You could make toasters by recycling used MacBook Pros!


lol meanwhile my 20 year old off brand toaster continues to toast just fine with 0 chips. As does my 10 year old dial based toaster oven




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: