

Ask HN: What software would you create on a super-fast CPU? - eecsjoe

Most of us create web-based applications, which aren't really limited by CPU processing power<p>But I read about a 48-core CPU and started thinking... what software would you create if you had access to a massively-powerful CPU?
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jacquesm
We already have massively powerful CPUs! I realize what you're trying to ask,
but if we stopped burning cycles like there is no tomorrow and instead wrote
our code as tight and as careful as used to be the norm then we could get a
lot more out of todays hardware than we do.

The problem is not the interesting problems we can or can not solve with
todays hardware, most of the classes of problems that require something
significantly faster than what you have on your desk today can be solved with
a minimal budget for some 'instances' on a commercial cluster.

Regular applications are less likely to benefit from large numbers of cores
until we change our way of writing software, but things like particle
simulations and other problems that lend themselves well to parallelization
are one area where you'd likely see some progress.

For many more ideas about what fields would benefit from this development you
could probably have a look at the kind of projects that are being developed
around GPU computing.

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wccrawford
I agree. I haven't felt the need to upgrade my CPU for years now... Not on my
development machine, nor my gaming machine. CPUs are plenty fast enough right
now... And if I really, really needed more power, I'd just fire up some
virtual machines at Amazon or Rackspace or Slicehost or somewhere. I've
actually been wishing I had an idea that took CPU so I could try them out
under those circumstances.

