The Future CPU's

(Via Infoworld) The future belongs to processors that are essentially big clusters of logic gates that switch quite rapidly. t doesn’t matter that a CPU like this is almost impossible to code to, because, as Intel saw so long ago, almost nobody writes in machine language any more. The road ahead isn’t about 8GHz Xeons or 32-core Opterons. It won’t be about hardware at all. It will be about the $100,000 commercial development suites that will perform automated, distributed build, run, observe, and optimize cycles until native code flows through every possible combination of processor types. And for another $50,000, tools will instrument a commercial app to optimize itself based on changing deployment environments. In this scenario, it might take Microsoft three months just to build a major release of Windows, harnessing the off-hours cycles of every machine on the Redmond campus, but the result would be an OS that could chop a big shop’s system requirements by a third or more. With Intel's IA- 64, a dream world of compilers that take their sweet time to build and optimize but that produce mind-blowing code will surface there first. Everything learned there will transfer to other architectures, however, and we’ll end up with a naturally occurring matrix of CPU types and deployment patterns that provides customers with meaningful choices.