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The most important question a CPU designer must ask himself or herself is, what is the purpose of the CPU? Most people in the business will immediately answer that the purpose of the CPU is to execute sequences of coded instructions. Sorry, this is the wrong answer. This definition is precisely what got us in the mess that we are in. Read full article.

The functional programming language Erlang is rightfully touted by its supporters as being fault-tolerant. COSA shares all the fault tolerance qualities of Erlang but this is where the similarities end. The COSA philosophy is that nothing should fail, period. There are software applications where safety is so critical that not even extreme reliability is good enough. In such cases, unless a program is guaranteed 100% reliable, it must be considered defective and should not be deployed. That's the main goal of project COSA: 100% reliability, guaranteed.

Forget computer languages and keyboards. I have seen the future of computer programming and this is it. The computer industry is on the verge of a new revolution. The old algorithmic software model has reached the end of its usefulness and is about to be replaced; kicking and screaming, if need be. Programming is going parallel and Jeff Han's multi-touch screen interface technology is going to help make it happen. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Han's technology is the perfect interface for the COSA programming model. COSA is about plug-compatible objects connected to other plug-compatible objects. Just drag 'em and drop 'em. What better way is there to compose, manipulate and move objects around than Han's touch screen interface?

According to a recent c/net article, Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar is reported to have said that "software has to double the amount of parallelism that it can support every two years." This is so infuriating. That's not the problem with software. The nastiest problem in the computer industry is not speed but software unreliability. Unreliability imposes an upper limit on the complexity of our systems and keeps development costs high. We could all be riding in self-driving vehicles (and prevent over 40,000 fatal accidents every year in the US alone) right now but concerns over safety, reliability and costs will not allow it. We have been using the same approach to software/hardware construction for close to 150 years, ever since Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm for Babbage's analytical engine. The old ways of doing things don't work so well anymore.

The industry is ripe for a revolution. The market is screaming for it. And what the market wants, the market will get. It is time for a non-algorithmic, synchronous approach. That's what Project COSA is about. Intel would not be complaining about software not being up to par with their soon-to-be obsolete CPUs (ahahaha...) if they would only get off their asses and revolutionize the way we write software and provide revolutionary new CPUS for the new paradigm. Maybe AMD will get the message.

Unreliability imposes an upper limit on the complexity of our software systems. We could conceivably be riding in self-driving vehicles right now but concerns over reliability, safety and high development costs will not allow it. As a result, over 40,000 people die every year in traffic accidents. Something must be done. Unfortunately, the computer industry is still using the same algorithmic computing model that Charles Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace pioneered close to 150 years ago. This would not be so bad except that the algorithmic model is the main reason that software is so unreliable and so hard to develop. It is time to question the wisdom of the gods of computer science and switch to a new computing model, a non-algorithmic, synchronous model. It is time for a new revolution. There is no avoiding it. The market is screaming for it. And what the market wants, the market will get. This is what Project COSA is about.

Having seen first hand the inertia and hostility of the western computer industry and computer science community toward any suggestion that there may be a better way of doing things, I have concluded that the new revolution cannot come from the West. They have placed their computer pioneers on a pedestal and nobody dares question the wisdom of their gods. India and China, on the other hand, don't have that problem. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. They have been on the tail end of the first computer revolution from the beginning but now they are in a position to leapfrog the western advantage and become the leader of the second revolution.