Thursday, October 30, 2008

Hot New Technology That Will Change Everything?

Everyone likes lists of stuff.  PCWorld has a list of 15 Hot New Technologies, one of them being massively multicore CPUs.  Missing from their write-up is some idea of what all these processors will do.  If we're talking two, maybe four, possibly even eight, then yeah, there's probably something for them to do at least part of the time.  But 32?  64?  More??

And new technology?  I guess the 16-processor Atari PC from the 80's doesn't count.  Nor do the dozens of other massively parallel machines that have gone down the tubes.  I guess a technology is new if it's failed for decades.

Instead of having more cores, why not small scale lithographs of Andy Kaufman on the chips?  They'll be at least as useful, more resistant to device failure, consume less power, and would be a great way of saying to consumers that "the joke is on you."