Today, the processor industry, with Intel in the lead does not see any reason to deviate from Moore's law, which was beginning to come to an end, by simply multiplying the processors. The tendency does not seem ready to stop and soon our Mac Pros will be quoted as 12 cores and 24 threads, before passing later to 16 then to….
However, for daily use, one does not feel large thing of this increase in the number of "heads" in the machine except when using special application softwares. The problem comes primarily from the software and the operating system that does not know how to use to the maximum these increasingly multi-cores (this is putting it simply since other factors come into play).
Apple has with Snow Leopard desired to define a new base allowing it to benefit better from this tendency of the hardware. If it is a success, it is still hidden, Snow Leopard giving us more and more the impression to differentiate itself from its predecessor essentially by the sum that one paid for it 29,90€…
On the side of Microsoft, they also think of the future and one of their engineers working on the cores system wants to revolutionize what is currently done.
He thinks of a core that would be radically different from what is currently made under Windows or Unix. He wants, as one can do with virtualisation, that in this future operating system he imagines it plays the part of a hypervisor between the hardware and the software that would run on top.
The problem remains that since he will start with a completely blank page, that it would take at least a few years and to find the magic code that would operate at a low level close to the hardware, and that would be able to distribute the required demands among all the cores. This is what Apple tries to do with Open CL, even if this is materialized by a software layer placed at a higher level.
