Tuesday, October 21, 2008

LLVM

Interesting GoogleTalk on LLVM. It's a big part of Apple's future, already being used on the iPhone and the core of the improvements in 10.6 The whole GrandCentral thing makes a lot more sense to me now. I'm hoping to dig a little deeper on it but there's not much information out there yet. I'm really curious if GrandCentral will be able to supplement/replace XGrid as a distributed computing platform that is (mostly) transparent to the developer? Clearly it would never be as efficient as a carefully crafted native distributed clustering code but it would be a start. We have all this CPU & GPU power going idle most of the time. Whoever figures out how to harness it is going to have a huge head start. There's really no doubt the future of computing is increased core density and more general purpose use of the GPU. The benchmarks on SETI/Folding running on GPU vs. CPU is a testament to that.

When you see stuff like this you realize how far behind both Windows & Linux are. Apple seems to be the only company really pushing innovation in desktop operating systems these days. Windows is stuck in the past, Linux is stuck trying to copy Windows.

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