AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

NY Times - John Markoff

At the outset of his presentation at the opening session of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs showed a slide of a stool with three legs to describe the company’s businesses: Macintosh, music and the iPhone.

The company is making another bet on parallelism, and the implications may be more profound than anyone yet realizes.

In describing the next version of the Mac OS X operating system, dubbed Snow Leopard, Mr. Jobs said Apple would focus principally on technology for the next generation of the industry’s increasingly parallel computer processors.

Today the personal computer industry is going through a wrenching change in trying to find a way to keep up with the speed increases that were the hallmark of the PC business until about five years ago. At that point, companies like Intel, I.B.M. and AMD had simply lived off their continual ability to increase the clock speeds of their microprocessors. But the industry hit a wall as chips reached the melting point.

As a consequence, the industry shifted gears and began making lower-power processors that added multiple C.P.U.’s. The idea was to gain speed by breaking up problems into multiple pieces and computing the parts simultaneously.

The problem is that, having headed down that path, the industry is now admitting that it doesn’t know how to program the new parallel chips efficiently when the number of cores goes above a handful.

On Monday, Mr. Jobs claimed that Apple is coming to the rescue. MORE