Hewlett-Packard Labs boffin Stanley Williams, has penned a report exploring the end of Moore's Law which says it could be the best thing that has happened for computing.

He wrote that confronting the end of an epoch should enable a new era of creativity by encouraging computer scientists to invent biologically inspired devices, circuits, and architectures implemented using recently emerging technologies.

Williams argues that : "The effort to scale silicon CMOS overwhelmingly dominated the intellectual and financial capital investments in industry, government, and academia, starving investigations across broad segments of computer science and locking in one dominant model for computers, the von Neumann architecture."

Three alternatives already being developed at Hewlett Packard Enterprise -- neuromorphic computing, photonic computing, and Memory-Driven Computing.

"All three technologies have been successfully tested in prototype devices, but MDC is at centre stage."