And now for something completely different…

Enough about I am Eclipse, Eclipse I am. I actually think Steve Northover really is Eclipse, or is it not Steve’s Widget Toolkit? Or is it Crazy Doug’s Tooling? Or something…

Anyway, the talk at Tom’s Hardware today, or at least this guy’s opinion piece, is on AMD’s insistence that multi-core is dead, long live Accelerated Processing Units. Actually, it sounds like almost the same thing as multi-core just with fancier hardware as some of the cores. The Opteron architecture makes the array of possibilities interesting and feasible and it’ll be cool to see what they come up with now that they’ve teamed up with my fellow Canadians at ATI.

One possibility I find intriguing is integrating Stream Processors into the concoction. From my Google searches I see stream processing has been around for a couple of years now and it has hit the streets as the technology behind the latest generation of graphics cards. Stream processing is essentially parallel processing units that perform like SIMD processors but on streams of data. In that sense it can handle larger volumes of data like a DSP but with multiple processing units.

So why is that interesting to me. Well, as I am always looking for the next great programming paradigm. When object-oriented first came along when I was in university, I was an early adopter because I could see the benefits it gave me when organizing my programs. I am always looking out for the next big improvement in programmer productivity and we’ve been stuck now for quite a while with objects and classes and methods and such.

I am positive the next big thing will be parallel programming. The hardware guys are making these great multi-core/multi-processing-thingy machines. The question is what is the right programming paradigm. Is stream processing it? Maybe. But I am thinking that the next big thing has to be multi-dimensional programming in some form or other. I still wonder back to Action Semantics from UML as a possibility, but this stream thing is interesting too…