Paul Otellini showed an interesting slide at the NY analyst meeting last night which shows how fast Intel hopes to move to multicore processors. As we reported this morning, this is essentially the end of the road for the Pentium 4 Netburst technology. Otellini said: "What"s next is something more profound, moving our product line from logical to physical parallelism. Parallelism is computer speak for taking a serial of tasks and doing them together. You need parallelism in the hardware and operating systems and apps that are aware the machine can handle multiple threads".
He said that Intel can move to a very broad use of multicores, so inside a given chip there will be two separate microprocessors that can handle a variety of tasks. "Most software application developers operate under a constraint that compute power at the PC is limited, with a certain amount of MIPS available," he said. "With multicores, software developers turned that whole paradigm around with unlimited instruction cycles. They can dedicate an entire core to the user interface, or to rendering, or to firewalls, or security. It unleashes them from the constraints".