14 DAY TRIAL // ...and it looks like Apple Mac could be among the first to benefit. I know that's looking perhaps a little too far ahead, but let's face it: who besides Apple can quickly embrace new, cutting-edge technology? Maybe Microsoft...?
As you might have read, Intel demonstrated last week the 80-core research processor, intended for common use. This gives a head start to Intel in this multi-core war that's arising. The company estimated the chip would become publicly available in about five years, and they still have to overcome some challenges. Intel couldn't yet attach memory to the chip and it's too large in size (275 mm squared).
But it's not the solving of these issues that draws back the launching five years from now. It's the software market that has little use for the 80-core chip for the time being. Intel's new chip is capable of processing 1 trillion calculations a second. What program would challenge this chip close to this capacity?
With its demonstration, Intel had a clear message to send to software developers and especially to operating systems developers, mainly Microsoft and Apple: the future is multi-cored and operating systems must learn to cope and take advantage of the revolution technology brought. Alongside Intel, rivals like AMD an IBM step in the same direction and it seems progress in the hardware area might be too fast for developers to handle.
Much to Microsoft's disadvantage, Intel's 80-core chip is not based on the X86 architecture, but instead it uses a 96-bit architecture. We'll have to see how quickly Microsoft manages to adapt to this new hardware trend. Odds are Apple will be faster; perhaps OS 10.6 will take full benefit of multi-core processing. But as I was saying in the beginning, that's thinking too far ahead. Time will take its toll and in about five years, we'll clearly see who the winner is.