quad-core processor
Already here in a Dell? That didn’t take long, did it. True, it doesn’t take much to replicate 2 cores to 4, but huh, Intel is really not letting up on AMD. Intel is promising an 80-core teraflop processor within 5 years, with cache stack-intereconnected, or perhaps with optical interconnects. Hardware is moving fast these days. Too bad compilers aren’t doing too well in extracting thread level parallelism yet. They had better catch up soon or they’d be the next bottleneck.
Chip multiprocessors have definitely caught on, realizing the predictions of the Hydra project from some years back. Come to think of it, I was pretty close to going into computer architecture… for old time’s sake, here’s a nice review from Olukotun.