The coming age of specialized (cloud) computing systems

Today we are generally running cloud systems on the Henry Ford model: you can have any sort of architecture for your cloud computing, as long as it is the same as everybody else's—based on X86 and Ethernet interconnect. A uniform platform allows cloud resources to be fungible and promotes the elasticity of the cloud, improving hardware utilization. However in 2020, as power efficiency becomes more important than hardware costs, we expect that the cloud will be filled with equipment that is the data center equivalent of your mobile devices--based more on hardware & software infrastructure designed together, and specialized for specific application areas rather than the general purpose components we use today.