re: FRANKENCHIP - This will change how computing is done

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The thing is performance isn't really that relevant right now. for most applications, current hardware provides more than enough processing power for applications.

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This is why I qualified it as being crucial for performance critical programming.


I would point out - however - that I think the landscape is changing in terms of what business's will demand in software. Now that HPC is available in the Cloud - small and medium sized businesses can make use of it without having to overcome the hurdle of buying and maintaining their own machine.

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Even with big data the barrier is often memory addressing more so than processing speed.

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You are right on the point that memory bandwidth constitutes a huge hurdle. I think there is still room for improvement in terms of algorithms, though.

Caching for instance is hardly ever used in the most optimal way. FPGA's may be able to help with custom caching (I'm just speculating - I haven't read anything that says they can).