End of Moore's Law: Or, a Computer Architect's Mid-life Crisis?

The computer architecture community faces an important and exciting challenge. On one hand, Moore’s law is slowing down, stressing traditional assumptions around cheaper and faster systems every year. But at the same time, our demand continues to grow at phenomenal rates, with deeper analysis over ever growing volumes of data, new diverse workloads in the cloud, and smarter edge devices. Is the situation dire, or is this just another phase in the evolution of system architecture. In this talk, I will summarize recent technology and workload trends and discuss likely scenarios for the evolution of future system architectures, with a focus on large “warehouse-scale computing” environments. Specifically, I will discuss how responding to the current opportunities will require more “out-of-the-box” designs —considering the entire datacenter as a computer, co-designing across hardware and software, and developing new architectural constructs.