I haven't heard about Tilera until just now: it does have potential, but disrupting X86? That requires proof.
Also GPUs have their uses, but general-purpose they are not. GPUs are complements to CPUs (just as coprocessors specialized for floating-point calculations where back in the day).
Most people here probably haven't lived the day when 80387 had to be installed alongside i386 if you wanted decent graphics performance. It is actually interesting that it takes so long for GPUs to be merged with X86.
In my opinion ARM is the only credible threat in the data-center, especially for servers that are mostly I/O bound. But on the other hand costs can skyrocket when scaling horizontally and having 500 HTTP servers (like Digg) is not at all fun.
And IMHO, x86 chips have better performance / watt.
For desktop computing X86 will still dominate, at least for the following 10 years, simply because of Windows; which runs on over 1 billion computers.
Yeah, I know it is fashionable on HN to say Windows is not relevant anymore. Doesn't make it true.
tilera claims to release a competitor to the x86 for the LAMP stack in Q4 2010, togheter with quanta(a big hardware OEM). but yes, it this requires proof.
for some tasks(like HPC , multimedia) , the gpu can handle most of the computation , and the cpu is somewhat of a sidekick(like in the nVidia ION netbooks , for example).
while windows would still dominate, the importance of a strong x86 cpu would decrease, by all the changes in the ecosystems , and the costs of the x86 processor will decrease.
Tilera is a very expensive option, though, and only makes sense for a small subset of the x86 market.
I had a phone conversation with one of their managers about a year ago (I was trying to see could I get a sample PCIe board) and they are damned expensive, so it would only make sense if you have something that 1) parallelizes very well, 2) actually needs the performance, 3) runs on Linux* or can be easily ported to their architecture and 4) you have high enough volume to make their overheads worthwhile. On the plus side, they seemed were very willing to lend their engineering team to help port to their architecture (as part of the devkit cost). Sadly, they don't have evaluation boards - you pretty much have to buy a devkit to evaluate it and the devkits costs approx. 5 times the price of the lowest end PCIe board (I'm not sure what hardware this included and afaik its a once off up-front cost).
(* Running on Linux doesn't mean it magically works, but the Tilera PCIe boards can run Linux, so it at least makes porting a bit easier)
But that doesn't change the facts: Intel DOES have competition to their high-end market from GPUs and the likes of Tilera. I can see the newer ARM processors starting to challenge their midrange line and obviously with Atom too.
Just today, I was thinking about getting an ARM Cortex A8 powered BeagleBoard xM as adesktop linux box replacement.
They are in the process of releasing a 512 core server togheter with quanta , in Q4 2010 targeted for the LAMP stack. they claim great saving in power and space, and strong performance.
it would be interesting to know the lifetime cost(including power, cooling and space) relative to the x86.
