I am a fan of conspiracy theories. Whether it is the "Tintin for adults" simplistic plots of 24, or the "Goldman Sachs is the epicenter for a new kind of white-collar mob," I lap them all up for the color they inject into life.

Which is why I have been enjoying Greg Pfistegr's blog, "The Perils of Parallel" so much. Greg writes about a lot of interesting stuff, especially if like me, you grew up feet firmly planted in software land expecting the hardware guys to do their Moore's Law dance and just keep ponying up the cycles for us to burn. One of the central themes of his posts— the one which is wet with the conspiracy paint— is that the shift to multicore processors has far-reaching implications on how we humans interact with computers, from developers trying to write performant applications to users looking for that "new computer high" that you used to get every couple of years when a hardware upgrade gave you a 10x perceived performance boost. As he himself writes in an early post:

It particularly bugs me that people still blather on about how Moore's Law will keep on trucking for decades. Maybe it will, interpreted literally. But the Moore's Law that will keep on trucking has been castrated. It lacks a key element (frequency scaling) that drove the computing industry for the last four or more decades. This is a classic case of experts focussing on the veins in the leaves on the trees and ignoring the ravine they're about to fall into.
More. I have this suspicion that many people who really understand how deep into the doodoo we're going are weasel-wording it deliberately. No point in frightening the hoi polloi, now, is there? Maybe there's a cure, who knows, we're not there yet, hm? Horsepuckey.

I think there may be something to what Greg is talking about here. A few months ago, I was visiting with some folks in Labs and mentioned that it seemed that we had sort of given up on running the clock up on CPUs and that "multicore" seemed as buzzworthy as "cloud" in that people seem to use this one-word incantation without further explanation to quiet the naysayers, and I got that glass-eyed look from the researchers I was talking that just made me want to crawl down from the clouds of pure R&D into my product development hole.

Later that day I saw Craig Barrett at Stanford speaking to students talking about how much hair Intel engineers have on their chest after decades of keeping Moore's train on the tracks (and more importantly, how we had at least a couple of more decades to go) and decided that perhaps I was just not getting that there was no problem here, and that the MultiCoreCloud would save us all. Or, at the very least, create a great runtime for the AIs that will rule us like organic batteries not worth recycling.

Thanks to Greg though, I now know that the Dharma initiative is behind this all, and that we all ought to wonder why those fancy new computers don't feel so new and fancy anymore!