The semiconductor industry is currently caught in the middle of what I call the third great wave of silicon development for processing data. The first great wave of silicon processors began with the invention of the microprocessor itself in the early 70s. The highly visible success of Silicon Graphics, Inc. showed that there was a market for beautifully rendered images on computers. At the end of the decade, ATI bought ArtX, and the survivors of this second wave of silicon processor development were set. A significant difference between this wave of silicon processor development and the first two waves is that the new AI or deep learning processors rarely communicate directly with user software or human interfaces -- instead, these processors operate on data.

Source: Forbes May 15, 2018 10:52 UTC