Are General-Purpose Microprocessors Over?

By Cadence

May 10, 2017

There is apparently a rule of thumb among journalists that when the headline of an article asks a yes/no question, the answer is always 'no'. Well, of course microprocessors are not over, so the answer follows the rule. But improvements in general-purpose microprocessors are over. The future will lie elsewhere. But let's start at the beginning.

I had lunch recently with Chris Rowen. When he became an IEEE fellow, I interviewed him and you can read some more background at He's a Jolly Good (IEEE) Fellow. He was a sort-of founder at MIPS and was the founder of Tensilica, which Cadence acquired in 2013. He was CTO of the IP group, but recently left to do a number of things in the area of deep learning. He does, however, still work with Cadence on Tensilica in general and deep learning, such as the recently announced Vision C5 Neural Network DSP.

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