Maximum PC

I've been doing a fair bit of 'catch up' work on concurrency, multi-threaded programming and the like lately and just wanted to share a couple of interesting articles that I've come across:

Will Parallel Code Ever be Embraced? discusses the plight of software running on multi-core processors. Previously, the author felt that consumers would insist that software be written to maximize performance on multi-core machines. He admits that he (and others at Dr. Dobbs) were wrong about this assertion in previous articles and now feels that coarse-grained parallelism will be the dominate form of parallelism in the future (ie multiple processes running across separate cores).

If you found the first article to be a bit of a bummer (due to the fine-grained parallelism), the second article on Intel's Xeon Phi co-processor (formerly called the Knights Corner co-processor) should cheer you up! The Phi co-processor is expected to be available later this year and have 50+ cores running at 1.2GHZ w/ 5GB of RAM. I haven't seen any information concerning price, but I would love to get my hands on one of them. Does anyone else want to write a video encoder for this thing?! =)

Why can't we write one in OpenCL or DirectCompute and use already existing technology? An HD 7970 GHz Edition peaks past 4TFLOPS in SPFP, 1TFLOPS on DPFP.