Herb Sutter: Design for Manycore Systems

This is exactly what GPUs do today, and it is also why NVIDIA and ATI are trying to make their GPUs available to programmers for general purpose use. See CUDA (http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home_new.html) and Stream (http://www.amd.com/US/PRODUCTS/TECHNOLOGIES/STREAM-TECHNOLOG...). These technologies let programmers use the parallel computation engine of the GPU to solve problems. Using such a tool is non-trivial, as the problem has to benefit from massive parallelization and you also have to have a problem big enough to overcome the data load penalty (getting the data from main memory/disk to the GPUs memory for processing).

Good point, plus they are well motivated to improve performance and typically are on the cutting edge.

Who else does a lot of tech innovation? Since on the server side this relates to cost / page view I'd guess the super-competitive porn industry will do some of it.

And of course keep an eye on the functional programmers. With parallelized map and filter we can do a lot...

Isn't that exactly what GPUs already do?