“Dark silicon” sounds like a magical artifact out of a fantasy novel. In reality, it’s one branch of a three-headed beast that foretells the end of advances in computation.

Ok—that might be too dramatic. But the looming problems in silicon-based computer chips are very real. Although computational power has exploded exponentially in the past five decades, we’ve begun hitting some intractable limits in further growth, both in terms of physics and economics.

Moore’s Law is dying. And chipmakers around the globe are asking, now what?