Fatter Chips, Untapped Potential

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Mundie's concern is that before long, the tech industry will suffer a dearth of applications that can take advantage of the new hardware in ways that resonate with consumers. "If I told you that I had 100 times more power, and I applied it to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, would you care?" said Mundie. "The answer is no."

Psychic chips

Martin Griss, associate dean for education at Carnegie Mellon West, who attended Mundie's talk, says squeezing more processing cores onto chips could open the door for a new breed of programs that can predict users' behavior based on what they've done in the past, the time of day or week, and clues from their calendars.

The results could be PCs that know not to interrupt you because you're working on a deadline, software that can obey rapidly spoken commands, and videoconferencing systems that can follow speakers around a room, he says. Virtual worlds like Linden Lab's' Second Life could also benefit from multicore chips so their graphics resemble sophisticated video games (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/16/07, "The Coming Virtual Web"). "It's clear there's enough power now to do simple things," says Griss. "As more can be done in parallel, you can analyze more options. Like playing [computer] chess, how deep into this tree of decisions can you go before it's time to act?"

Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista, includes some of this speculative ability. The software's SuperFetch feature builds a statistical model of users' behavior, the time of day, and other factors that predicts what program they're most likely to launch next, leading to faster load times.

Bright future

But more can be done, including writing software that recognizes handwriting with greater accuracy or that automatically open e-mails and documents related to a meeting that happens at the same time each week. "Like a great personal assistant, the computer should move into this space I call 'speculative execution,'" says Mundie. Microsoft is working on programming tools that can let developers exploit parallel programming techniques, previously the domain of supercomputer users.

Venture capitalists are just starting to mine the area. Matt Murphy, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, led the firm's September, 2006, investment in PeakStream, a Silicon Valley company that sells programming tools that can let developers harness the power of graphics chips to speed up computing in industries including investment banking, oil and gas exploration, and pharmaceuticals. PeakStream has raised $17 million from Kleiner, Sequoia Capital, and Foundation Capital.

If Mundie has his way, that's only the beginning.

Ricadela is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in Silicon Valley.