Latency maps

Could this be a new frontier in digital art?

When I/O latency is presented as a visual heat map, some intriguing and beautiful patterns can emerge. These patterns provide insight into how a system is actually performing and what kinds of latency end-user applications experience. Many characteristics seen in these patterns are still not understood, but so far their analysis is revealing systemic behaviors that were previously unknown.

Source: ACM

Interview with Intel re 48-core SCC chip (codename Larrabee)

Intel's shipping samples of its experimental 48-core processor (codename Larrabee). They are calling it a SCC "Single Chip Cloud computer". Some notable design features no floating point processor and clock speed around 1.6 GHz. It's interesting to see the future of this design, it seems highly suited for server consolidation / virtualisation applications. See the link below.

Of course the graphics card companies have been moving towards programmable architecture, their chips are highly suited for parallel applications also. Perhaps the CPU that we know of today (highly optimised single threaded) will become a "co-processor" of the future, much like the "math co-processor of the 80s).

Source: X-bit labs