The Register recently had an inside the labs experience at Intel and got to see first hand what the company is doing to make its 80-core vision of the future a reality.
And evidently a lot of what it’s doing is trying to convince everyone-developers, consumers, and dreamers-that there is a reason to bother.
I’m personally listing myself in the “think it’s a groovy idea” column. Providing all that power in one place will at least give us a shot and creating some really nifty new stuff: computers that listen to natural language and talk back, that sort of thing.
But with the world’s legion IE and Word users happy with what they have now, Intel is doing everything they can to spark the imagination of developers (driving innovation) and consumers alike (driving demand).
The article discussions a multi-pronged approach that includes investing Intel’s own resources to develop apps that showcase what you could do if you had that kind of power (like sensing cheering crowds in video of sporting events to automatically create highlight reels). And they’re funding tens of universities around the world to develop the programming models necessary to produce the software to satisfy these future dreamers.
It’s a good, quick read that I recommend.