[throwaway1979]

I used to feel exactly what you say. In 2006, when I first encountered the cell processor inside the PS3, my eyes popped. I found it extremely challenging to write useful software. The asymmetric architecture was a big culprit. I briefly looked into the dev environments offered by the likes of Rapid Mind but gave up. This didn't feel like general purpose computing.

Back in 06, I remember seeing fear in the eyes of some hardware and software engineers. In the next year, we were supposed to have 100 cores in our plain old desktops. How the heck are we going to program them? I found the situation a bit irrational. Every talk started with the death of Moore's Law because we couldn't shrink dies any further. More cores was posited as the only solution. Except, no one could code them for general purpose apps like Word, Excel, etc. In retrospect, I wonder why I don't have 100 cores in my desktop in 2012. I suspect because they aren't useful for average joe user.

P.S. Forgive my directionless rambling. I don't have a particularly strong opinion on this subject anymore.

[gavanwoolery]

Yeah, the average program will see no benefits - the one area which it will make a huge difference is games/graphics/simulation. There are so many problems in graphics that are fairly trivial to parallelize (especially with the rising interest in voxels and raytracing). The main thing is it needs to be very easy to program, and cross-platform (neither is an easy feat). Right now we are kind of stuck in a rut with current graphics APIs - you can do a lot with them, but they are also very limiting when compared to a general purpose CPU - back in the days of DOOM, the Build Engine, etc, one used to be able to write a rendering from the ground up; now (for better or worse) we are limited to one way of pushing polygons onto the screen, and there are a magnitude less of ways to be creative. Note that I used to be a huge GPU proponent, but after about a decade of working with them I am turning back to software rendering.