A Bright New Day, Tomorrow?
For over a year I've been debating how and with whom to go on multicore boxes. To date I've built and played with two Athlon boxes. I've committed myself to delving into Linux From Scratch and Xen, as I see the 64 bit boxes best used and protected by virtualization. But when it comes to multicore stuff two big issues jump out. First, with anything above a dual core, there seems to be resource issues as the quad cores are memory starved by hardware bottlenecks. Second, with mulitcores of quad core and above there are serious software issues. A physorg paper, ( sorry I can't cite it as I just gave it a quick read in passing ), suggested intel and all others can't see past problems in software design when trying to implement current practices on multicore platforms. From the reading I've done, over the at least the next 18 months, the best way seems to be to go with dual core, possibly high end gaming mobos.
As a developer of indie, multimedia stuffs ( a recent reincarnation borrowing heavily from a past reincarnation as a wilderness photographer ) I see virtualization on multicores using a stripped down version of, say, Debian and Xen dedicated to a small set of programmes to be the way to go to get the most from mulitcores. The best buys today would seem to be Asus's mobo for gamers like the Striker (intel) and Crosshair (amd). I'm open to being bitch slapped around and pointed in the right direction. :)