canspice.org

Tonight Alasdair, Chris and I attended an Intel “media event”. As upstanding members of the media (okay, we all have blogs), we were “invited” (okay, we signed up on a web page) to attend a grand announcement from Intel.

Let me say, drinking a beer on the bus to the announcement was cool. I was living like a rock star, if only for ten minutes.

Let me also say that drinking another beer before the announcement was cool.

Anyways, Intel’s announcement. Intel is open-sourcing Threading Building Blocks, which allows for easier programming and deployment of multi-threaded C++ code. It’s released under the GPL version 2, and will be shipped with a number of operating systems in the near future, including Red Flag Linux, Novell, and Solaris.

Honestly, all this talk about multiple cores and massively parallel systems sounds like a solution in need of a problem. I hope that they’re not talking about the average user, the Joe Bloggs who uses his computer for email and web surfing and playing Solitaire, because they don’t need a four-core processor. Hell, they hardly need a dual-core processor. Pushing beyond four cores? I don’t see why home users need it.

Higher-end users definitely need it. Scientific users, definitely. Industry, most likely. And I don’t know enough about Intel’s finances to know if these users make up a substantial amount of their business…