If You Build It, Will They Come?

Abstract

Hardware vendors face serious challenges as technology limitations have slowed the rate of evolutionary improvement in general-purpose processors. Staying on the current trend line requires significant expenditure, while transitioning to a disruptive technology presents a high risk of failure. In order to navigate an unpredictable, rapidly evolving technological landscape, the authors posit that the goal of architects should be to pursue architectural agility in order to lower the barriers to developing innovative and disruptive solutions. They present some thoughts on how engineers can integrate agility into both processor and datacenter design.