Innovation in Software

Intel are going down the path of smaller and less power-hungry chips in future. Or so it would seem from the “as live” write-up Jon Fortt gives on his blog of the opening keynote at the Intel Developer Forum.

There also seems to be a concentration on mobile, which is sensible given that laptops are due to outnumber desktops as the preferred computing platform in the home and office by 2009. WiMax seems like it’s a technology Intel are excited about. Given that the OECD think it’s pants is very optimistic of them.

I have to appreciate these planned advances in hardware Intel lay out here. Better hardware makes better software possible. In recent years people have suggested that current hardware is “good enough” and we no longer have a need to persue Moore’s law and to add even more performance.

To those cynics, I say phooey.

Integrated graphics chipsets capable of teraflop performance, integrated WiMax and the ability to offload Blu-ray and HD processing to hardware opens up new avenues of development. Richer, more responsive, more useful environments can be built. It’s not that the hardware is “too much” but that we developers have imaginations that are too small, our thinking is too rigid. Stuck in a desktop/folder/document metaphor that is now out-dated, we seem to have resigned ourselves to not pushing boundaries.