Heterogeneous systems and the future

What does the future hold for computing systems? Dionisios Pnevmatikatos (Technical University of Crete) sees heterogeneous systems being central for the next ten years.

Transcript: 'So the future is definitely hard to predict, but what we see – what I foresee – for the next, say, ten years, is that we’re going to have very heterogeneous systems. The systems will combine different pieces that work well for a particular purpose. We see this already, in cell phones, let’s say, and so on, and this is going to be more so because of physical reasons: we want the battery of our cell phone to last for a very long time. General-purpose software cannot achieve that. We see this with say accelerators for machine learning and AI [artificial intelligence] that are becoming very popular recently, and we see this trend even for high-performance data centres and so on. So this is going to be a general trend.'