A glimpse of the future?

32-Core Processors: Intel Reaches for (the) Sun

Intel is of rolling out its Core 2 micro-architecture now. The Xeon 5100 server processor aka Woodcrest was released only weeks ago, Core 2 Duo for the desktop (Conroe) is expected on July 27th and the mobile version Merom will follow only weeks later. The next milestone is quad-core processors, which the firm will produce by fitting two Woodcrest dual cores inside a physical processor package (Clovertown). You may have realized that there is a product development pattern behind recent and upcoming Intel multi core processor releases. Amazingly enough, Intel has been studying Sun's UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) to come up with a radical processor redesign for 2010 that could perform 16 times faster than Woodcrest. This is no marketing blurb, guys; this is technical intelligence from within the Borg collective.

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I want a 32-CPU MP machine with those puppies on it. 1,024 cores anybody? Engadget claims each of those cores has 4 hardware threads. 4,096 hardware threads anybody?

Engadget goes on to say:

The biggest hurdle of all, however, could be a consumer Microsoft OS that can fully help software take advantage of multiple cores, a task which Vista isn't quite up to.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. Server SKUs will take advantage of multi-core without problem. It's our client situation that needs a little help, and even then the OS has little to do with it.