Intel Not Going to Wait for Software to Catch Up
Intel wants to always be ahead of what software demands.

Just this year alone (and we've only cleared three months of it), Intel has unleashed an entirely new generation of desktop and mobile mainstream processors, as well as bumped up its enthusiast desktop offering to a hexacore, 12 thread Gulftown CPU. Earlier this week Intel bumped the core count for Nehalem-EX server chips to eight with the ability to process 16 threads.
With this rapid pace of rollout, is there any worry that Intel's hardware performance growth is outpacing the speed of software progression? Intel says it's not worried at all. In fact, it prefers staying ahead of the software demand curve.
"We learned our lesson in waiting for software. We did this 64-bit thing that was perceived to be a little bit late relative to the market. So we will get the hardware out there as soon as it's ready," Kirk Skaugen of Intel's Architecture Group said at the Nehalem-EX launch, according to the Register.
"What drives things mainstream," Skaugen said, "is this 'software spiral' that's been talked about since the early days of Andy Grove. The fact that when we announce new hardware, it creates a software set of innovations that put more pressure on the hardware to create new hardware innovations - and the cycle goes on and on."
Basically, if you build it, they will come.
I was also thinking that with such fast processors and graphics cards we have today, to really make use of them to the fullest, we really need to start having decently priced SSD's, not only to store the OS, but everything else too. It's probably the major bottleneck in any given system. Even an old Pentium III at 1GHz benefits immensely if you give it a modern 7200rpm Hard drive with more data density per platter, so modern systems defintely need SSD's to bring the best in them. Storage systems have always lagged behind.
Oh god. Can you think about anything other than video cards?
sooner or later some one will come and write a language that can thread anything i think...
PS: i dont know much abt programming
thanks
AMD is competing on the same level. No one gives them attention though. They currently have 12 core Opertons out and 16 core versions with smaller fabs are due this summer.
@gekko668, it is very hard to write thread safe code and as i said above, some code is impossible to thread
personally, this is one of the things i work on in my spare time as i see it being one of the parts of programming that needs a lot of work right now
EDIT: this is what i go to for school, computer science
You're smoking crack if you think M$ is going to make the mistake of using an underpowered in-order processor for the next xbox. Developers want to spend time making games, not compliling software builds over and over and over again to make the code run fast enough.