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by khandekars 6207 days ago
I will like to believe that the Desktop software will move towards parallelism, may not be to the same extent as of HPC, but in a similar direction in the sense that it will certainly go away from strictly single core approach. It won't be easy, e.g. none of the web browsers today fully exploits all cores of a box. But, it will be fun to watch.

Off topic: I'm in your fan club, :) due to your "Hack the planet" blog http://wmf.editthispage.com since Dec. 1999.
1 comments
wmf 6207 days ago
The cost of finding all the single-thread bottlenecks and parallelizing them is immense -- akin to the Manhattan Project -- and the payoff would be that Intel and AMD could sell different (perhaps lower power) processors than they do today. Why bother? We have processors that work perfectly well for desktop software.
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khandekars 6206 days ago
True. At the same time, we keep expecting more from our machines, fuelling feature growth and consequential demand for faster processing mechanisms.
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wmf 6206 days ago
Yes, so future apps may prefer to run on the Larrabee cores, but the fat cores that old apps depend on cannot be removed.
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