Wild speculation on consumer workloads in 2010–2020

Abstract

Summary form only given. Games are among the most performance-intensive consumer applications, and often lead the way in bringing research technologies into practice. This occasionally leads to non-evolutionary leaps in performance and workload characteristics, such as the 1000-fold increase in 3D throughput enabled by consumer graphics accelerators beginning in 1998. The speaker will argue that another revolution in consumer computing performance is on the horizon, driven by large-scale multi-core CPUs with vector-processing extensions inspired by todaypsilas graphics processors (GPUs). He will present a view of the key problems and solutions facing consumer software developers in 2010-2020, and speculate on the shape and scale of workloads in that timeframe. The essential questions to cover are: What portions of an application can scale effectively to many cores and vector processors? How and when can concurrency research bring techniques like functional programming, software transactional memory, and vectorization into mainstream practice?