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.
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.