Question

1. With all those self-driving taxis scooting around, it would be nice if you could hail one just by giving the usual hand signal as it approaches -- rather than having to use a cell phone to make the pick-up request. You would like to build a system using a camera and quite a lot of image processing computation to recognize when a human is hailing. The currently best processor you can buy isn't fast enough to do this computation before the taxi has driven past the person who wanted a ride. Fortunately, your business plan says you don't need to ship your first product for two years. How would you go about figuring-out if fast enough versions of that processor will be available in two years when your product needs to ship? (Note: there are lots of valid answers to this question.)

Answer 1

Hi,

There are indeed several ways to make this prediction.

1. The most time-tested method is using Moore's law (brain-child of Gordon Moore of Intel in 1975). He predicted that number transistors on a microprocessor chip would double every two years. This was modified was his colleague David House as microprocessor performance doubling every 18 months with power consumption remaining the same. This law has proved to be true from 1975 to until recently (2015) although one can see a little-bit of saturation though now.

If take this law as a rough guideline, one can predict what the speed of processors would be in 24 months.

2. Ask the field engineers or sales engineers of major semiconductor manufacturers (Intel, TI, Nvidia, ST, AMD, etc.). They would, in general, be in a position to give you a forecast of what is in the pipeline.

3. Multi-core processing is often used in image processing applications. So some investigation into the history of development of multicore processors can help one predict how many cores would be available on one chip in two years' time and with what clock speeds.

4. Go though the journals on VLSI technology or computer architecture to understand what might be in offing!

Hope this helps in some manner!