Complex Chips Make Security More Difficult

"The practice of “zero trust” is particularly important here. Any device or software outside the organization cannot be trusted". Great approach but it is amazing how many breaches are still happening due to lack of basic prevention measures taken

Security will play a huge role in obsoleting software development as a job.

Monkeys in chairs papering over generic CPU design is pushing chip makers to consider silicon designed to workload spec; input parameter set, let it go.

Chips are now undergoing their great decoupling like software. It’ll take a while as manufacturing process pivots but rather than 8 generic cores we’ll eventually have SOCs per application. Software will be pushed to the UI layer alone for users, and whatever industry needs to boot strap manufacturing.

Frankly I’m looking forward to it; I can’t think of anything software companies have provided humanity that will stand the test of time, except making us all learn their new preferences.

So the whole reason we have general purpose CPUs is because in the 50's/60's they were hulking giant beasts both in size and power consumption - computing was only economical on these devices if shared.

Things shrunk and now everyone has a computer in their pocket - which in most cases is a window to the next generation of hulking giant beast - the "cloud".

So if I'm going to develop applications for the cloud instead of PCs or mainframes, it's going to need to be general purpose--because it's shared and rented by the minute/CPU cycle. Just like the mainframes of old. So some notion of general-purposeness will always be there.

Maybe hardware will support and fossilize around programming languages? One can argue that x86 is doing that and is essentially an "SOC" for C.

Kind of silly title. I think complexity makes anything more difficult.

> pushing chip makers to consider silicon designed to workload spec

Well .. the big one of these is GPUs, which started as fixed-function pipelines and turned into massively parallel execution systems repurposed to cyrptocurrency.

Various people have tried to do niche things such as neural net coprocessors. General-purpose or GPU-like or DSP-like systems tend to win in the market ... because they're run on software, which is more flexible.

There's a reason ARM are now up to 180 billion cores shipped; the easiest way of making a custom IC is to wrap it around an ARM core with some firmware. The code is burned into ROM (which has security advantages and disadvantages!), but to me it still counts as "software".

At some point the iPhone will cross the triple digit of number of CPU cores onboard (counting across the whole board, not just the SOC and radio). It will be rather difficult for anyone other than apple to count when that is.