Today’s computing challenges: opportunities for computer hardware design

Due to the explosive increase of digital data creation, demand on advancement of computing capability is ever increasing. However, the legacy approaches that we have used for continuous improvement of three elements of computer (process, memory, and interconnect) have started facing their limits, and therefore are not as effective as they used to be and are also expected to reach the end in the near future. Evidently, it is a large challenge for computer hardware industry. However, at the same time it also provides great opportunities for the hardware design industry to develop novel technologies and to take leadership away from incumbents. This paper reviews the technical challenges that today’s computing systems are facing and introduces potential directions for continuous advancement of computing capability, and discusses where computer hardware designers find good opportunities to contribute.