The Way Forward

A major appeal of cloud computing is that it ab-stracts hardware architecture from both end users and programmers. This abstraction al-lows underlying infrastructure to be scaled up or improved—for example, by adding datacenter serv-ers or upgrading to newer hardware—without forcing changes in applications. The long-dominant x86 processor architecture, along with high-level, portable languages such as Java, PHP, Python, and SQL, has helped assure the continued viability of such abstraction. Meanwhile, expo-nential growth in microprocessor capability, mirroring Moore’s law, has helped to improve performance for most applications that execute on general-purpose processors, including those deployed on clouds. However, as transistors continue to shrink, concurrent limitations on power density and heat removal and the inability to scale down operating voltage any further mean that it’s no longer possible to increase micro-processor performance by adding identical, general- purpose cores.