Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[aleph0]

/and a wild speculation for what still could come./

Do you mean the discussion on "parallel X86" ?

as in :
||
The next evolutionary step is a parallel machine. Dual-cores are only an inefficient stop-gap design that wastes transistors with duplicated or unnecessary resources (eg coherency logic between the core's caches).
||

This guy is obvious very young !

1. Creating a "true" parallel machine would involve changing the software architecture at the OS level for starters . That cuts out Windows, Linux etc. etc.
2. To make "use" of a parallel architecture means also new programming high-level languages ( some exists already - but unheard of by most people ). So forget your C++, Java might just have a chance due to the fact that memory mamagement is handled automatically - i.e. by the Java engine.
3. Critical for parallel architectures is CPU-to-memory speed and size. If you halve the memory-size per CPU, the (properly designed) machine will be almost twice as fast.
4. To go this route (properly) would mean giving up X86 almost completely.
5. Maybe Itanium was a half-hearted digression in this direction - and look where it got !!

Been there already !