Microprocessors for the new millennium: Challenges, opportunities, and new frontiers

As designs become more complex, technology scaling more difficult, and power issues more pressing, "business as usual" no longer suffices, if the industry is to continue its long-standing tradition of microprocessor innovation. To provide means for system performance advancements and power management, there must be focus on all aspects of the computing platform-architecture, micro-architecture, bus memory, and I/O performance-much more than in the past. Multithreading and multi-core computer micro-architectures will increase both general-purpose and networking processor MIPS. Transaction-focused server processors will benefit from large on-die caches. Special-purpose architectures and circuit techniques will be required to deliver performance with higher efficiency. Future microprocessors will evolve as integration of DSP capabilities becomes imperative to enable such applications as media-rich communications, computer vision, and speech recognition. These advances in processing natural data will lead to a change in the computing paradigm from today\´s data-based, machine-based computing to tomorrow\´s knowledge-based, human-based computing. As the Internet becomes more integral to businesses and consumers, there will be new uses for and users of microprocessors. All this can be accomplished only with wired and wireless high-bandwidth Internet connectivity, driven by high-performance computer servers to fulfil the demand of computing in the Internet economy.