Big data needs a hardware revolution

Software companies make headlines but research on computer hardware could bring bigger rewards.Credit: Morris MacMatzen/Getty Advances in computing tend to focus on software: the flashy apps and programs that can track the health of people and ecosystems, analyse big data and beat human champions at Go. Meanwhile, efforts to introduce sweeping changes to the hardware that underlies all that innovation have gone relatively unnoticed. Since the start of the year, the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) -- a consortium of companies, academia and government agencies that helps to shape the future of semiconductors -- has announced six new university centres. Having watched the software giant Google expand into hardware research on artificial intelligence (AI), the main chip manufacturers are moving to reclaim the territory. As they do so, they are eyeing the start of a significant transformation -- arguably the first major shift in architectures since the birth of computing.