> not games, desktops, web/db servers, lightweight stuff like that.

Things like games, desktops, browsers, and such were designed for computers with a handful of cores, but the core count will only go up on these devices - a very pedestrian desktop these days has more than 8 cores.

If you want to make software that’ll run well enough 10 years from now, you’d better start using computers from 10 years from now. A 256 core chip might be just that.

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markhahn 2 days ago | parent [-]

why do you think lightweight uses will ever scale to lots of cores?

the standard consumer computer of today has only a few cores that race-to-sleep, because there simply isn't that much to do. where do you imagine the parallel work will come from? even for games, will work shift off the GPU onto the host processor? seems unlikely.

future-proofing isn't about inflating your use of threads, but being smart about memory and IO. those have been the bottleneck for decades now.

	▲	rbanffy 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> why do you think lightweight uses will ever scale to lots of cores? Because the cores will be there, regardless. At some point, machines will be able to do a lot of background activity, learn about what we are doing, so that local agentic models can act as better intelligent assistants. I don't know what will be the killer app for the kilocore desktop - nobody knows that, but when PARC made a workstation with bit-mapped graphics out of a semi custom built minicomputer that could easily serve a department of text terminals we got things like GUIs, WYSYWIG, Smalltalk, and a lot of other fancy things nobody imagined back then. You can try to invent the future using current tech, or you might just try to see what's possible with tomorrow's tools and observe it first hand.