“During the era of declining transistor costs, processors were in a race that demanded a new release every two years, which starved necessary architecture changes. We saw a continuous stream of general purpose processors as a result. This is likely to change. Specialized architectures can offer a 10 or even 100 times improvement in performance-per-watt metrics. We see numerous examples of this from companies such as Tensilica, or Microsoft with their “Catapult” project which combines an FPGA with a general-purpose processor. The other trend that this will drive is the addition of more specialized processing in accelerators to offload CPU’s.”