So I think that your (err, everyone’s) technical work will be moving into the browser though, in some sense. Not all of it. But collaborating with one or two people on a project is very nice. Collaborating in real time with 30 or so is amazing. Some of the real-time collaboration that we’ve only truly had broadly available (Google Docs, Wikis, etc.) has been made available in the web browser. I think that’s important for a reason.

P.S. – I’m aware that Abiword supports useful collaboration, and some other desktop apps via XMPP. The browser, however, saw a very large jump recently (last 3 years) in the number of real-time collaborative apps available. The desktop did not see anything like that. Anyway, my customers don’t have Abiword installed, and they never will, sadly.

[quote]
I do grant that web browsing probably will get better with multicores. I’ve been talking about my technical work, however, not recreation.
[/quote]

and

[quote]
I also admit that I haven’t got many bright ideas about what I wish hardware designers would provide instead of multicores, now that they’ve begun to hit a wall with respect to sequential computation.
[/quote]

and also

[quote]
The field of combinatorial algorithms is so vast that I’ll be lucky to pack its sequential aspects into three or four physical volumes, and I don’t think the sequential methods are ever going to be unimportant. Conversely, the half-life of parallel techniques is very short, because hardware changes rapidly and each new machine needs a somewhat different approach.
[/quote]

and finally

[quote]
So I decided long ago to stick to what I know best. Other people understand parallel machines much better than I do; programmers should listen to them, not me, for guidance on how to deal with simultaneity.
[/quote]

Regards, Roman

Have you read Donald’s books? MMIX is supposed is fully parallel, but only at the power of “2 or 3″ due to how Donald made MMIX-PIPE. Effectively Donald did make a few typos so that “3″ and “2+epsilon” gets mixed up, but I’m not perfect either. Are there anyone out there asking that we need a larger number than 3? Please tell me and I will investigate. A similar question: Does any one of you think you know what exponentation actually means? If that is the case I will recommend you to study von Neumann algebra.

“Language is the key to understanding the problem of language”

The spectacular increase in CPU speed in the past was not achieved only due to higher clock rate but also due to a better CPU design. Early Intel CPUs with CISC architecture, which spent a few clocks per instruction, has been replaced with the modern superscalar design, which can perform a few instructions per cycle. Even for modern processor we can see that high clock speed does not necessitate a superior performance. For instance, 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo is significantly faster than the 3 GHz Pentium 4.

Do the hardware designers have run out of ideas? If so, it happened a long time ago. All modern desktop CPUs use a superscalar architecture, and the first superscalar processor was built by Seymour Cray in 1965, i.e. 6 years before Intel released its first microprocessor Intel 4004. Since then only EPIC was invented, and though EPIC was hailed as a way to achieve higher parallelism than it is possible with the superscalar architecture, EPIC has not lived up to its promise aside some specialized tasks.

Do we have an alternative? Seymour Cray had always resisted to massively parallel machines: “If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?” but in the middle of 1990s, he started his own massively parallel design. Unfortunately, his sudden death made impossible for us to know what direction his work would take, but the start-up company that he led is now specialized in reconfigurable computing. It is early to say if that configuration is the future of computing, but whatever it will be, I think it will be much closer to the data-stream-based computing paradigm than to massive multiprocessing. Remember Knuth words: “Pipelines actually work for me, but threads don’t.”

As always, the answer may lie in vastly different applications. Perhaps games will rescue us from the idle cycles again, utilizing it for some AI opponent.

What’s interesting is what Intel and AMD so far does NOT do with the vastly increasing number of transistors when they ask the question if we want more cores or increased clock speed. Perhaps we want cheaper circuits, more energy efficient, or more functionality (all sorts of I/O and graphics spring to mind).

In theory, but I never get very usable results in practice. This may be an OS issue. A hosed winbox takes forever to respond to keyboard input, regardless of the priority of the hosing process.

It’s becoming more common for the “average” user to use photo editing, and video software, which can sink a fair bit of power. It’s also becoming more common for peripherals such as wireless cards to be software implemented. It’s obvious to even a fairly naive user that some of these apps are very wasteful of the computational power. From a financial and ecological point of view, buying more processor power so that software manufacturers can blatantly waste it is horrifying, but I will almost certainly break down and do it.

Well, you get the same kind of a effect with a single core CPU if time consuming tasks are run at a low priority. With a low priority you’re able to use the machine as usual and if you aren’t using much processing power elsewhere (e.g. just surfing around or reading emails), the process won’t take much longer.

I think we’ll probably move away from purely heterogeneous architectures over to multiple cores with a batch of vector processors. However, this of course raises the question if all that processing power is actually any useful for the average user. Rendering or encoding aren’t really everyday tasks for example.

NB this is for a really, really short scientific computing program. Shark is awesome on OS X for figuring out hotspots and free as in beer with OS X.