In the summer of 2018, professors John Hennessy and David Patterson declared a glorious future for custom hardware. The pair had picked up the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award for 2017 for their roles in the development of the reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architectural style in the 1980s.
Towards the end of their acceptance speech, Patterson pointed to the availability of hardware in the cloud as one reason why development of custom chips and the boards they would be soldered onto is getting more accessible. Cloud servers can be used to simulate designs on-demand and, if you have enough dollars to spend, you can simulate a lot of them in parallel to run different tests. If the simulation does not run quickly enough, you can move some or all of the design into field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These programmable logic devices won’t handle the same clock rates as a custom chip but they might only be five or ten times...