Improve performance, especially on multi-core machines
This is scary. I'm not ready to see the comeback of time when a single app would lock up the entire system for 5-10 seconds. I hope the next generation of OSes will have an option for how many cores each process is allowed to use.
Multiple cores aren't the answer to bloated software. Hey, my iPhone renders animation much smoother than Linux version of Firefox on Core 2 Duo - sure there is plenty of room for improvement, but don't touch my cores, I need them to run other apps/sites!
You can set which cores a process runs on in Windows. In task manager, right click on a task and click 'set affinity'. I'm sure there's a way to do it in linux too, but my linux box only has one core.
Chrome already runs on multiple processors and it doesn't lock my system in any way. Mind you I'm the type of user that can have over 20 tabs open at any given moment and sometimes have irefox with multiple tabs, chrome, ie, word and other processes running at the same time on my Athlon X2.
I don't think you need to worry all that much, it seems operating systems (or just cpus) have become better at dealing with responsiveness under pressure since the single core era.
Eitherway you can already run web workers in Firefox so in a way it can already touch several of your cores.
You can set the CPU affinity for specific processes on any modern operating system. Maybe you wanted to set this for every process that the application will launch? It's still possible, but even less user-friendly.
Well... a nice dropdown in system preferences with something like "Allow any program to use no more than XX processor cores". Plus an editable list of exceptions at the bottom, where you can add serious things like Photoshop, SQL servers, compilers, etc.
I'll be seriously terrified by espn.com when Flash becomes multicore-aware.
It's already possible to do true multicore processing in Flash Player 10 using the Pixel Bender runtime. It's a bit cumbersome because you need to write your processing kernel in the data-parallel Pixel Bender language and call it from ActionScript using the ShaderJob object.
However it's definitely worth it for any parallelizable data-crunching tasks because you get both JIT compilation and multicore support. (Flash Player 10 compiles the processing kernel to native x86 code on the fly and splits the work across up to 8 native threads, IIRC.)
This is scary. I'm not ready to see the comeback of time when a single app would lock up the entire system for 5-10 seconds. I hope the next generation of OSes will have an option for how many cores each process is allowed to use.
Multiple cores aren't the answer to bloated software. Hey, my iPhone renders animation much smoother than Linux version of Firefox on Core 2 Duo - sure there is plenty of room for improvement, but don't touch my cores, I need them to run other apps/sites!