Monday, July 13, 2009

PC's processing architecture adopting a brain-like structure?

The PC's processor history goes back to the introduction of the IBM PC on August 12, 1981. We are talking about a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and 16 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 256k. After 30 years of development of computing in business and at home a lot has changed. The typical processing architecture evolved from soley single-core and single-task into multi-processor and multi-core. How will the processing architecture of the PC develop in the future?

Operating systems nowadays support multi-threading, multi-core processors and dedicated co-processors for massively parallel floating point and graphics processing. Extrapolating this trend, I predict that the architecture will grow very similar to that found in (human) brains. My main argument is that the nature of the PC's creator is human: Shaping the world after his own image. And as the image of the human processing machinery has matured from an advanced calculator to a society of diverse partialy autonomous agents, so has the PC architecture matured. I am curious to see where we have gone in 10 to 20 years from now.

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