We’re seeing a full frontal assault on Intel by competing computing architectures. Everyone is jockeying to see who is going to have the better next gen architecture. The problem is that in order to start attacking general computing as a problem, you need first customers who buy a lot of chips, and those customers tend to have specific workloads they want accelerated. Now we’re back to designing for customers instead of abstractly making the absolute best chip.
And that’s the reality right? Demand drives innovation it private enterprise is funding it. If you want a chip for the public good, you’d need to fund it with public money and that’s a different dance with the devil.
In short, I think the way that technology is produced is fundamentally customer focused right now.
I think this has cause and effect reversed. Advancing general purpose CPU's is very hard and expensive nowadays. The slower rate of progress means that custom chips make more sense, they take longer to become obsolete.
And that’s the reality right? Demand drives innovation it private enterprise is funding it. If you want a chip for the public good, you’d need to fund it with public money and that’s a different dance with the devil.
In short, I think the way that technology is produced is fundamentally customer focused right now.