The Future is Now

By _TSMC Blog

December 16, 2021

Evolving Computing Landscape

When I worked for a big corporate executive in charge of mainframe business in the early 2000s, we spent a lot of time visiting Fortune100 CIOs in New York City. And while mainframes still are strategically critical today, I look back and realize how rapidly the computing landscape has shifted, and how the future is now.

Distributed systems took over many computing workloads over the last few decades. Then the mobile revolution put computing into billions of devices in our pockets. Today, cloud computing and accelerated computing bring compute power to billions of people and trillions of intelligent machines. Ultimately, the boundary between the physical and virtual world will likely blur over the next decade!

And the underpinning of all of this? Semiconductor technology.

Why Performance?

On a late night in a university lab, one of my classmates asked me a question: “If the computer I have now is good enough for all my needs, why do we need to push for device scaling and new chips?” We clearly lacked imagination on how many new applications could be enabled as computing power skyrocketed over the coming years.

Since the emergence of the Internet and the smart phone, there’s been an explosion of data. In 2020, over 60 zettabytes (ZB) were created or replicated, according to IDC (IDC Global DataSphere and StorageSphere Forecasts, 2021). An insatiable amount of high-performance computing is required to filter and process all of it.

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