Speaking at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Universal Parallel Computing Research Center, Microsoft kernel architect Dave Probert said that today’s operating systems aren’t doing a good job with new multi-core chips. “Why should you ever, with all this parallel hardware, ever be waiting for your computer?” he asked.
Probert suggested that perhaps processors will eventually have enough cores that each core could be assigned a particular program. “With many-core, CPUs [could] become CPUs again,” he said. “If we get enough of them, maybe we can start to hand them out.” In this case, the OS would act more like a hypervisor in a virtualization setup.
