I am excited to see if this evolutionary bottleneck will take us beyond the von neumann architecture.<p>The article implies we will get even more specialized hardware that will speed up common categories of algorithms like gpus asics and FPGAs have been used.<p>I wonder what kinds of performance gains could be had from a merge sort asic for example.<p>I think the real interesting thing will be if new architectures beyond von neumann will allow us to think outside the box and break out into new algorithmic territory that is not obvious from our current perspective.<p>It&#x27;s very hard for us to throw away our toolchain towers of Babel but I think the departure has already begun when you look at bitcoin mining and gpgpu programming.