2005: Multicore Processors

AMD, the microprocessor manufacturer, announced the first multicore microprocessor. Shortly thereafter, Intel follows suit.

Multicore computing is understood as a new solution to the problem of improving processor performance, but it might be much more than that.

For decades computer scientists have known there’s an alternative to traditional computing: having many processors working on the same problem at the same time. But programming for parallel processing is much harder than programming for a single processor, and that difficulty has discouraged us from exploring that technology.

Truth is, we never really had to go there because single processors got faster so quickly, we never really needed an alternative.

However, ironically, it’s the need for processor speed that is now forcing us to figure out parallel computing. The faster processors run, the more power they consume and the more heat they generate. Both of these are limiting factors. Because multicore gets its edge by running more processors, not faster ones, it allows the core to stay cool and energy-efficient. Many analysts expect multicore to dominate processor design from now on, with the number of connected cores per motherboard rising steadily as we get better at solving the programming problems presented by this new architecture. A decade from now parallel programming will be the standard and perhaps we will be a lot closer to matching the skills of the human brain.

2006: The Network

The growth in average traffic level (75%) outpaced the growth of capacity (47%) on the world’s Internet backbones for the third consecutive year.

For the last few decades, the world’s networking engineers have done prodigies in building track just in front of the advancing locomotive of Internet traffic. But recently the locomotive has been gaining. We might be just a few years away from a new kind of Internet, one in which applications are triaged and bandwidth is metered and everybody has to make do with performance levels far below ideal.

While there are many culprits, the biggest appetite out there belongs to video. (In March 2007 more than 100 billion videos were watched by users in the U.S. alone. That’s a lot.) Almost every day brings news of a new Internet video application, from movies on demand to TV-over-IP to civic and or educational applications of YouTube. NBC has just announced that it is planning to use the Internet to carry more than 2,000 hours of Olympics coverage next summer, and NBC will not be the only network streaming from Beijing.

Comparable developments are unfolding in many enterprises as video is used for more functions, from videoconferencing to speeches by management to remote attendance at important conferences. Eventually “bandwidth rationing” will probably arrive even in companies with 10-gigabit LANs, and you can guess on whose shoulders the task of imposing that rationing is going to fall.

That's right. The CIO.

2007: The iPhone

The iPhone: The last word in connectivity? Or the beginning of a new chapter? We'll see.

Steve Jobs demonstrates that he finally and totally and conclusively gets the difference between machines that compute and machines that connect.