If I had to guess new capabilities chips will add in the 2020s, hardware-accelerated compression or compact encoding are near the top of the list. That could be anything from branch-free instructions to read/write varints to fully-self-contained (un)packer(s) you just point at some data and run. I'm <i>most</i> interested in something so fast as to be worth considering to replace fast software algos or to use in places we don't think about compressing at all now, though hardware accelerated zlib would obviously have applications too.<p>Some existing stabs in this direction include that some Samsung SoCs had a simple "MComp" memory compressor (<a href="https://github.com/XileForce/Vindicator-S6-Unified/blob/master/drivers/memory/exynos-mcomp.h" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/XileForce/Vindicator-S6-Unified/blob/mast...</a>), that the new Qualcomm Centriq chips use compression (<a href="https://3s81si1s5ygj3mzby34dq6qf-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/qualcomm-amberwing-memory-compression.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://3s81si1s5ygj3mzby34dq6qf-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...</a>), and that some IBM POWER CPUs have dedicated circuitry for memory compression (<a href="http://ibmsystemsmag.com/aix/administrator/lpar/ame-intro/" rel="nofollow">http://ibmsystemsmag.com/aix/administrator/lpar/ame-intro/</a>). There's also hardware zlib offload, like Intel QuickAssist.<p>I'd expect more of this in the future because 1) space-is-speed is just a fundamental thing we deal with computing, 2) chips keep getting faster relative to RAM, 3) you already see lots of special-purpose instructions being added (crypto, strings, fancier vector stuff...) as it gets more expensive to improve general-purpose IPC. Maybe there's some additional value given the arrival of 3D XPoint and (probably) other future NVRAMs--would help you fit more on them without spending more time compressing than writing--but regardless, the trends seem to point to compression assists being interesting.<p>One reason I could turn out wrong is if the general-purpose facilities we have make software the best place to write compressors anyway, i.e., fast software packers get so good it becomes difficult to justify hardware assists. General-purpose low- and medium-compression algos like LZ4 and Zstd run pretty fast already, and we have even faster memory compressors (WKdm, Density). Of course, that's on big Intel cores; maybe special-purpose compressor hardware will continue to mostly be more interesting alongside smaller cores.