eabrek

No idea :)

I only built one computer by hand (in college). That was when you didn't need paste :)

One or both of x64 and ARM will be around a long time (probably 20 years, at least. It's hard to look past 10; and 30 or 40 is very hard).

GPUs are able to hide their instruction sets behind the driver. This allows them to change more frequently. I haven't looked at Nvidia or ATI, but the Intel GPU is very much like a normal CPU instruction set.

I would expect that to remain for a while. It won't be until we've had a generation or two of people living with no hardware improvements (due to the end of silicon scaling) that people will be ready to try something radically new (necessity and invention :)

There is some amount of waste do to repeated efforts. Of course, everyone does things a little differently, so you get different solutions in the marketplace.

The majority of research is openly shared (via publications and patents). Patents are cross-licensed to prevent "mutually assured destruction".

The most common way is to get a PhD in something related to computer architecture.

My own path is more convoluted, as I did not get a PhD :)

It's driven from two sides:

1. Moore's Law (which is what we use to forecast our performance target)

2. Lithography research and development (who are the real miracle workers).

So, as architects, we sit down and say "8 years from now, we will be at one quarter feature size - what does our design look like". Then, hopefully, the lithography guys deliver something close :)