Re^2: Multi-core and the future

[willyyam]

The multicore boom is just as silly as the mega and gigahertz race. No-one really needs that much computing power. When I say no-one, I really mean it: you think you do, but in reality you could do everything you do now with machines from ten years ago.

I must respectfully disagree. This is true for many, but I am running microsimulations that I need to parallelize across ten multi-processor 4Ghz machines so that we get answers by the end of the weekend, and this was not possible with the commodity machines of ten years ago.

I think the web-browsing, email reading, word processing spreadsheet viewing masses only need such massive computing power because of OS bloat and a demand for pretty colours, but I need this much computing power to do my work.