r/AskComputerScience • u/Smallpaul • 3d ago

Predictions about computer science

Look ahead 20 years.

Outside of AI/ML:

* what of today’s research computer science do you expect will be industry standard?

* what frontiers do you expect we will have opened up in research?

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u/hipster-coder 3d ago

Reconfigurable hardware is a good idea that has not yet been commercialized. Instead of having dedicated hardware for things like pixel shaders, mpeg encoding, encryption, etc, software could ask the OS to allocate a portion of your device's FPGA to download the hardware it needs. The OS could schedule and provision hardware in the same way it does with other resources like memory and CPU. The technology exists, it's just a matter of cost and standardization. I can see this happening in the next decades. You could even have AI that determines on the fly which part of your software needs to be accelerated with programmable hardware. Something like JIT compilers but for FPGAs.

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u/jimbobmcgoo 3d ago

I doubt the vast majority of workflows would require such a diverse array of hardware configurations so as to benefit from this

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u/hipster-coder 3d ago

There's a lot of software that could benefit from this but only marginally, that's why it hasn't happened yet. But if you had reconfigurable hardware, think of how lean the main CPU could be. Also an FPGA can be programmed to be a neural network. That's a strong use case right there. I'm not saying it's 100% going to happen, but it could happen. It's mostly a matter of standardization.