Abstract
The phenomenal growth of the microprocessor business over the last two years has been well covered in the technical literature. Extrapolating from this growth, typical predictions of future trends have suggested that by 1980, microprocessor complexity will increase five to ten times while the speed of the chip will triple.1It seems reasonable to expect this performance at approximately today's microprocessor prices. If instruction set efficiency is assumed to show a direct correspondence with chip complexity, these chips can be expected to be 15 to 30 times as capable in a given application.