The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology
Name
3430936.pdf
Size
25.34 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
40dcfb54574220218f4a6c179ff48d08
Author(s)
Thompson, Neil
Spanuth, Svenja
Date Issued
February 22, 2021
Journal
Communications of the ACM
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Citation
Thompson, Neil and Spanuth, Svenja. 2021. "The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology." Communications of the ACM, 64 (3).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The general-purposeness of today?s computers comes from the technical breakthroughs of computer scientists like von Neumann and Turing, but also from a mutually-reinforcing economic cycle, where product improvement and market growth fuel each other.
This article argues that technological and economic forces are now pushing computing away from being general purpose and towards specialization. This process, driven by the breakdown in Moore?s Law, has already begun and threatens to fragment computing into 'fast lane' applications that get powerful specialized processors and 'slow lane' applications that get stuck using general purpose processors whose progress fades.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3430936
