Comment Re:Time for vector processing again (Score 1) 251
Back in the 90s, there were custom super-computer processors (both vector and scalar), that were faster than desktop processors for all supercomputing tasks. This hit a wall, as the desktop processors became faster than the custom processors, at least for some tasks. If you can get a processor that's faster for some tasks and slower for others, but costs 1/10th the price of the other, you're probably going to go with the cheap one. The world has petaflop computers because of the move to commodity parts. Noone could afford to build 160,000 processor systems from YMP processors.
btw, multi-cores are pretty terrible for desktop applications. They really excel for server transaction processing, but most desktop users haven't any use for more than 2 cores. A radical shift in programing is going to be needed before massively multi-core processors are any use to a desktop user.