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Thursday, January 15, 2009

Cringley on Intel's approach to parallel processing

Parallel Universe
By Robert X. Cringley

Cringley's article brings back fond memories of my past studies of parallel computing. I could give comments, background info, and explanations to most paragraphs. Here though, I'll stick to (and criticize) the following:
That may well set a practical limit on the multicore strategy long before we start buying hundred-core PCs.
Does it matter, though? While there may be applications that demand the power of many cores, most people aren't using those applications. Other than hard-core gamers, few people are complaining that their PCs are too slow.
Of the top of my head, I see two major uses for more desktop processing power via multiple cores:
  1. indexing files (names, tags/keywords, contents of documents, images, videos, sounds, etc.) in the background without slowing down user apps (this will drastically reduce the need to create subfolders and the stress of wondering where one stashed that important doc whose name one doesn't quite remember...);
  2. speech recognition, which will permit routine accurate dictation.
These are both available on Vista, but are compute-intensive and are only now becoming somewhat useful on desktop machines.
No doubt there are many more, but it seems to me that on laptops and desktops they will mostly be used to make it easier and more pleasant to create, find, and manage documents, images, videos, etc.

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