Jouni Osmala (josmala@cc.hut.fi) on 5/23/09 wrote:
---------------------------
>You asked lower power more integration, relatively fast
>less cores. Thats intel low/mid-range offerings in the
>near future.
>Dual core nehalem with integrated graphics.

Oh, absolutely. I know. I might even have something like
that under my desk that I can't talk about.

So what was my point about the rants?

I'm ranting against the idiots who continue to talk
about how software must be more highly threaded, and how
multi-core is the inevitable future.

Those people are morons. It's not the inevitable future
at all. Software programmers should not think that
they have to write multi-threaded programs. It's too hard,
and the payoff is too little. And it absolutely isn't
where the industry is even going.

So I jumped in when I saw yet another hardware person
complaining about software not being threaded enough. I
am trying to explain why threading doesn't work, and why
the future is going to still be largely single-
threaded (or rather more likely - threaded, but only to
a fairly low degree).

The 2x cores vs 1.2x frequency is simply a false dichotomy.
That's neither the question nor likely the answer. The
real question is "where is technology going", and the
answer is that mass market still drives all high
tech, and that multi-core likely isn't going to push there.

Mass market is pretty clearly pushing in a totally different
direction, in my opinion.

Linus