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Supercomputing on your desktop.

Article Excerpt
Ray Kurzweil has garnered a great deal of attention by exploring the future path of computer technologies. His books use past trends and current information to predict what the world will be like 10, 20 and 100 years from now. His analysis is so in-depth and his reasoning so persuasive that his ideas are treated as models of the future rather than optimistic speculation. One of his more popular graphs illustrates the date by which a personal computer will have reached a level where it has the capacity to think like a human. He believes that current computers are able to process as much information as a dog's brain and they will reach human levels by 2020 (1).

Quite apart from Kurzweil's predictions, Intel and AMD have delivered computer chips that make major leaps forward in computation every year. Both companies have made it clear that their future processors will offer something different. Instead of doubling or tripling the linear speed of their chips, they will be producing chips that contain multiple processors inside each one (2).

Chips with two or four processing cores are available now, but within a few years they will deliver 32 or 64 processors to a standard consumer desktop. Both companies plan to double the number of processors, also known as "cores," inside a chip every 18 to 24 months. So for example, if we have 4-core machines in 2008, then we will have 8 in 2009, 16 in 2011, 32 in 2013, 64 in 2015, and 128 in 2017.

Within the very short period of nine years we will have gone from a few processing cores to over 100. The consumer desktop begins to sound like a small supercomputer. It is a little personal version of a NORAD command center, NSA code breaking machine, Wall Street financial cluster, or Google search farm--right on your desktop.

An Industry-Changing Threat

All of these processing cores present a serious challenge and an industry-changing threat to the companies that make the software for these machines. From Microsoft to the one-person programming shop, everyone is going to have to learn to work with this new paradigm of computation. Almost all computer programs are designed to do computation linearly because they have been built to run everything through a...

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