Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

Well, that's true if the core size stays the same and the cores stay homogeneous. GPUs already have 100s of simple cores, and stuff like OpenCL allows your multithreaded, vectorizable app to run on such a heterogeneous setup today. Technologies such as Larrabee blur this further, putting dozens of simple x86 ISA cores out there.

I think you're right that you won't see 256 i7-class CPUs in a computer. I think you're wrong that you won't see 256 application processors in a computer. You will probably have a couple beefy CPUs for the single-threaded portions, and lots of simpler processors to sop of the rest.

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