Submitted by “The Heterogeneous System Architecture Foundation is poised to ‘define and promote an open, standards-based approach to heterogeneous computing that will provide a common hardware specification and broad support ecosystem to make it easier for software developers to deliver innovative applications that can take greater advantage of today’s modern processors.’ The HSA Foundation goes without Intel’s support.” Interesting.
How about one or two x86, and lots of ARMs. Octopus or better. And GPU.
How about standards based and open source friendly specs that deliver a common stack up to the hardware (ala USB) for every OS to unleash the GP-GPU power.
Edited 2012-06-14 08:17 UTC
You can’t really expect that right away from the 2nd biggest x86 manufacturer.
But, down the line, an array of at least dozens ARM cores “interleaved” into a large GPU could be interesting, I guess. Maybe Larabee done right even.
Also…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Furber#Current_research_interest…
http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/
A while ago, during the Vista release I think, Microsoft created an API for running applications while a laptop was in sleep mode. I believe this mode was intended to use a secondary low power CPU. It could do things like continue downloads, receive email and IM messages, display the time and show calendar alerts. The designs I saw used a second small LCD display on the back of the laptop.
This little ARM core sounds like it would be perfect for use in such a system.