Issue of the Week:

By Doug Barney

The game of hardware/software catch-up has perhaps changed forever. You know the drill. Intel and others trot out rippin’ new chips, and soon after new forms of bloated software bog them down doing things no one really asked for.

For the most part, these are faster and faster chips, but with the same monolithic kind of processor architecture. Nowadays, multicore, multiprocessing, and clustering are changing all that.

We are in a position where all our client computers could soon be mini-supercomputers. Vendors like NVIDIA Corp. (Santa Clara, CA) are making this happen through add-on boards. And as Intel and AMD push the multicore envelope, our PCs will be super even before they are juiced with NVIDIA’s amazing graphics boards. In fact, Intel said at a recent developers’ forum that it could ship processors with possibly hundreds of cores by 2015.

Sounds great. But for most of us that don’t do custom programming or run specialized and hardware-optimized applications, this hardware is all dressed up with nowhere to go – especially when it comes to Windows.

Let’s face it, Microsoft is even afraid to fully take the 64-bit plunge. Have you ever tried to run the 64-bit version of XP? It has fewer drivers than a Wyoming highway.

But 64-bit ain’t nothing compared to the massively multicore processors that will be standard in just a few years time. And Microsoft seems to have no real plan to exploit all this new juice.

It does have the Concur Project (as in concurrent), but there are no indications that this effort to exploit multicore is fully baked into plans for the next client OS, which we have to imagine is four or five years away anyway.

Microsoft should buy a company like PeakStream (too bad, Google just snapped ’em up) that automatically translates between the application and the multicore-multiprocessing-clustered-GPU-ed-out back-end, fully exploiting whatever hardware is back there.

If Microsoft doesn’t make this capability common, perhaps Google will. With a simple API that understands complex back-ends, Google could dethrone the Windows API in rather short order.

What would a world where every computer is a super computer be like? Tell us all at barneymailto:[email protected].