Too many cores

Hmmm… I think I pretty much have to agree with Donald Knuth on this one: multicore processors are basically not that great of an idea for general-purpose computing.

Problem is, this looks like one of those wrong turns that will lead us quite far afield before we get back to the highway. There’s a market dynamic that causes otherwise intelligent decision makers to choose poorly: “You have 4 cores (which is a bad idea)? Well, then I’ll have 12 (which is a three-times-bigger idea)!”. (Yeah, I know that particular chip was mentioned as targeting servers, for which a much better argument can be made for multicore, but they’ll inevitably drive those into desktops, etc. because people don’t want to have to use different architectures for different machines).

The one thing that could save us from going too far astray is mobile computing. Multicore has infected that world, too, but it isn’t as likely to take hold there. The need to keep power consumption under control will probably steer processor architects in more innovative directions.

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