Maybe I should explain my terse comment. But first, I agree that it's a submarine PR piece for Microsoft. How many software companies are cited in that article? How many technologies are mentioned and/or explored? In short it says "Multi-core processors have potential, and [only] Microsoft has the best minds trying to exploit that potential."
Parellelism has been available in less local forms for decades. Supercomputers, clusters, more recently grid computing. These aren't new problems for computer science, they are only new problems for desktop software developers that have always assumed a simpler processor architecture.
So imagine a program that could identify parallelizable sequences of instructions in other programs, and split the program accordingly. Such a program may be able to exist, but it appears to be a very hard problem (it's even a hard problem for humans). Vista is definitely NOT this program.
Maybe I should explain my terse comment. But first, I agree that it's a submarine PR piece for Microsoft. How many software companies are cited in that article? How many technologies are mentioned and/or explored? In short it says "Multi-core processors have potential, and [only] Microsoft has the best minds trying to exploit that potential."
Parellelism has been available in less local forms for decades. Supercomputers, clusters, more recently grid computing. These aren't new problems for computer science, they are only new problems for desktop software developers that have always assumed a simpler processor architecture.
So imagine a program that could identify parallelizable sequences of instructions in other programs, and split the program accordingly. Such a program may be able to exist, but it appears to be a very hard problem (it's even a hard problem for humans). Vista is definitely NOT this program.