What Applications Will Drive System Performance?

Foredecker asks: "Companies like AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, ATI and others are continuing to drive silicon performance to new levels. Of course, every day computing (basic web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, personal finance, and the like) don't require a Intel 3.2Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading or a AMD Athlon 64 FX and their associated platforms. Of course, there are apps that will leverage today's high performance platforms. Games are an obvious category, as is video editing. I'm looking for apps that will be widely adopted and will drive volume hardware shipments. Things that come to mind are: effective, speaker independent voice recognition, accurate repeatable object recognition in digital photos and videos (or from live feeds such as web cams). What other application categories are there that will drive the need for bigger-faster-better hardware platforms?"

Comments

.NET and DRM

[Mr. Darl McBride]

A lot of the push for faster computers is going to come from applications becoming substantially less efficient. Anyone who's used the Visual Studio .NET GUI for a major project or any other code written with .NET can tell you that it's nowhere near as lean as native Windows code, yet MS is pushing to migrate applications to .NET as it offers the company much more control of the platform.

Similarly, the applications running in curtained memory are going to stack up at an alarming rate once Longhorn and other platforms start to see pervasive digital rights management. As every bit of data being generated or passed from application to application is being tested against dozens of different filters, CPU time is going to go up in smoke, and it will be illegal to stop these activities from taking place in most countries.