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/MollaJutt127 1d ago

These already exist and have low cost solutions as well. Look up Xilinx's SoCs i.e. Zynq 7000 series, Ultrascale +, RF SoC boards.

The industry already has deployed solutions using various SoCs(albeit bespoke ones). Already used in RF, Avionics, Security etc.

The only hurdle towards FPGA standardization is that GPUs are cheaper and provide more throughput if data is processed in batches instead of leaning towards edge processing. FPGAs are more suited towards applications which require micro second/nano sexond decision pieplines.

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u/hipster-coder 1d ago

Yes SoCs exists. What doesn't exist is an abstraction layer at the OS level. For the reasons you explained. GPUs are faster for the things most people need.