This is a quote from an article in the
New York Times:
The opportunity for the company is striking, Mr. [Craig] Mundie said, because manycore chips will offer the kind of leap in processing power that makes it possible to take computing in fundamentally new directions.
He envisions modern chips that will increasingly resemble musical orchestras. Rather than having tiled arrays of identical processors, the microprocessor of the future will include many different computing cores, each built to solve a specific type of problem. A.M.D. has already announced its intent to blend both graphics and traditional processing units onto a single piece of silicon.
In the future, Mr. Mundie said, parallel software will take on tasks that make the computer increasingly act as an intelligent personal assistant.
Well I'm excited. I spent
several years studying architecture in the built environment and every time I see the design principles that go into true architecture find their way into technical architecture makes me think my time was well spent. If you think about how pragmatic building design or master planning is an evolutionary descendant of the way humans live and occupy space it only makes sense that technology design will follow that same evolutionary pattern. This organic relationship, to me, is the basis of good solid design. You could refer to it as ergonomic technology. As the industry moves more into
n-core technology platforms I would expect the usability and interoperability of these systems to more natural to human instincts. Like, for example, if I look away from the screen maybe it goes blank to save on power consumption and lights back up when I focus back on the screen. For the system to make that decision today it would take power hungry CPU cycles to crank through facial recognition algorithms. Thats a tall order in today's CPU design terms. With the introduction of
n-core CPU design direction like that which is described in the referenced article you start to think that just maybe we're closer to getting true human compatibility like this minuscule example. The iphone and other multi-touch technologies have covered some ground here but we will have severe limitations in software compatibility as time goes on. I expect this because, as the chip designers become more complex and proprietary, they will not be willing to share how many and what types of processing cores perform which functions etc. This makes coding software for cross-platform compatibility very difficult. Look at the gaming console race, a game designed for the PS3 in not compatible with your core duo running linux. Maybe this means all OS's and software will have to be compiled by the owner of the platform for which it will run?? Wow, here comes bug land for sure... Unless there is a standard like traditional x86 architecture it will become that complex. How can I help?
The group of coders who hang out around the iphone-dev corner store have released code that jail breaks iPhone 2.0 firmware. The current version is PwnageTool 2.0.1. Don't waste your time hacking up your 3G unless your a tech junkie who like to smash things. Even with this successfully installed on the 3G iPhone your still stuck with AT&T. There are no SIM lock hacks for the current base-band firmware to remove the requirement to use a contract-bound carrier. However, you can use this firmware 2.0 hack on the iPhone 2G running 2.0 firmware. SIM hacks are readily available for this platform. I think, once the dust settles, the 2G iPhone will make a nice tech-junkie toy that you can pick up cheap on e-bay ;)
