What's ahead in computer design?

CMOS technology should, over the next few years, reach lithography of under 0.1 /spl mu/. This provides a die area improvement of a factor of 10 over today's technology. What is the best use of this area? Multiprocessors, very high level superscalar processors, VLIW, processor-memory combinations, or simpler processors with very large caches? Some have made the case that pin bandwidth is an important limit that must be confronted by any organization. This presentation reviews the scalability of our current technology and critically analyzes the various alternatives to the best use of silicon area in the era of 0.1 /spl mu/ technologies. The rapid advance of technology has made possible a number of processor improvements which would have been thought impossible just a few years ago. These improvements include cycle time, cache size, and an extraordinary increase in the complexity of the processor; this complexity is required for the management of relatively large scales of instruction level parallelism.