Seems multi-core issues (Larrabee) is driven by the CG Game playing young male scions, testosterone poisoning; they want it all and they want it now.
I guess Dad just wants faster SQL, and is willing to wait …

When? Let the guessing games begin, 2009? 2010? 2011? Later?
If I’m Intel I’m hoping sooner, guess MS too.

I suspect that the Intel cores will be more beefy, but if my CS 333 memory serves –which is spotty at best for us old fogies– each core can still only actually perform one calculation at a time. Context switching makes it look like more than one happens simultaneously.

I will certainly do some research with people that do know hardware to see what the functional differences are between x86 cores and geforce cores. I will let you know anything I can share.

And like you said, bring on the competition!

I don’t claim to understand the underlying hardware involved, but it seems to me that NVIDIA is already doing what Larabee is talking about. Are 24-32 x86 processor cores going to be able to compete with the 480 cores in the latest Quadro release? Or the 200+ on the current desktop GPUs? My personal opinion? I hope so. I have always believed in the power of real competition for improving technology and, in turn, the common man’s experience. Of course, I am a bit motivated to hope that NVIDIA comes out on top, but I say, “Bring on the competition!”

From the software viewpoint, which I understand well, I think that the real success will need to be in the API that we Software Engineers are given for using these GPUs. I don’t want to have to know the intimate details of how all these linked cores do their work. I just want to be able to assign them a bundle of computations and see the results in an easily-integratable manner.