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Intel - Market Doesn't Need Eight Cores
PeterK writes "TG Daily has posted an interesting interview with Intel's top mobility executive David Perlmutter. While he sideswipes AMD very carefully ('I am not underestimating the competition, but..'), he shares some details about the successor of Core, which goes by the name 'Nehalem.' Especially interesting are his remarks about power consumption, which he believes will 'dramatically' decrease in the next years as well as the number of cores in processors: Two are enough for now, four will be mainstream in three years and eight is something the desktop market does not need." From the article: "Core scales and it will be scaling to the level we expect it to. That also applies to the upcoming generations - they all will come with the right scaling factors. But, of course, I would be lying if I said that it scales from here to eternity. In general, I believe that we will be able to do very well against what AMD will be able to do. I want everybody to go from a frequency world to a number-of-cores-world. But especially in the client space, we have to be very careful with overloading the market with a number of cores and see what is useful."
Constantly streaming video in multiple thumbnail size icons on taskbars...
Umm, I already have that in my OS X dock. What else have you got?
Hmm, I'm not sure we need much stronger, but it does not take much processing power now. Between and encrypted home dir, VPN, and SSL/SSH, everything is already pretty much encrypted at least once.
Maybe a little, but again, not a lot CPU use here.
MUCH beefier JIT on virtual machines, on-the-fly JIT for dynamic languages, more complex client-side rendering of Web content (SVG, etc)
Yeah, that is likely.
Other things that we haven't even thought of because they're impactical now...
One core will be adding a wilderness backdrop and some little birds on my shoulder on the fly to the video chat image of myself I stream to my coworkers. Another will be adding bunny ears or devil horns on the video chat I'm receiving from a certain engineer who drives me nuts. Invest in the realtime video effects market now!