Nano Banana Origins of Compute Architecture The earliest computer architectures were defined by scarcity. Transistors were costly, memory was limited, and performance expectations were modest. Systems relied on single-core, sequential execution where correctness mattered more than scale. Instruction sets were closely matched to the hardware, and software was written with detailed knowledge of the machine’s behavior. Architecture centered on basic arithmetic logic, simple control flow, and minimal memory structures. As scaling improved, performance gains came from higher clock frequencies rather than new programming models. Pipelining, instruction-level parallelism, branch prediction, and out-of-order execution allowed more work per cycle. This approach eventually hit power and thermal limits, while memory latency lagged behind improvements in logic. These constraints forced a shift in architectural thinking, from optimizing a single core to […]