During a conference for its channel partners in Prague, James Reinders, Chief Evangelist and director of marketing and business development for Intel's Software Products Group made some interesting observations of about the future of systems design in a world populated by multicore processors.
When people think about multicore processors today they tend to think of them in the context how they are marketed and sold today, which is basically set up a set of two, four, six and soon to be eight cores featuring the same uniform processor.
But Reinders notes that in the future systems will be made of multiple cores and some of those cores are going to specialty processors that might be dedicated to graphics, security or any number of functions. According to Reinders, what this means is that systems designers will have more freedom and flexibility to configure machines for any number of purposes.
The diversity of the potential systems that could be built might meet with some manufacturing challenges in terms of assembling them in large numbers, but for the people that specialize in creating custom embedded systems or white boxes that arrival of multicore processor may prove to be an unprecedented boon.
Only time will tell how this might all play out but for the first time in recent memory the potential for unbridled imagination to return to systems design may be at hand once again.