[bitwarrior]

> The PS3 failed developers because it was an excessively heterogenous computer

Which links to the Wiki:

> These systems gain performance or energy efficiency not just by adding the same type of processors, but by adding dissimilar coprocessors

Modern CPUs have many similar cores, not dissimilar cores.

[kmeisthax]

Mobile CPUs embraced this hardcore; but the problem is that most of those cores don't have the programmer interfaces exposed. The most dissimilarity you get on mobile is big.LITTLE; you might occasionally get scheduled on a weaker core with better power consumption. But this is designed to be software-transparent. In contrast, the device vendor can stuff their chips full of really tiny cores designed to run exactly one program all the time.

For example, Find My's offline finding functionality runs off a coprocessor so tiny it can basically stay on forever. But nobody outside Apple gets to touch those cores. You can't ship an app that uses those cores to run a different (cross-platform) item-finding network; even on Android they're doing all the background stuff on the application processor.

[MBCook]

AI accelerators are a new popular addition. Media encoder/decoder blocks have been around for a while. Crypto accelerator blocks.

[dkersten]

Some intel processors have P/E core splits. So do some apple processors and mobile processors.

Our normal desktop processors have double the cells cores. Workstation and servers have 64 or more cores.

Many core is alive and well.

[rokkamokka]

Ah, my bad, I didn't understand the definition of many-core