will they use them to heat water in the summer?

you'd never here about it on google searches :)

They are aware of that, from the report:

"though GPS is now embedded in many systems for time and frequency transfer, there is an urgent need to back it up, or allow for appropriate holdover"

They seem to want funding for research into better hardware for the timekeeping itself. better then the quarts crystals we currently use.

fire the engineers, hire good sales people.

i was just doing a rough cpu*cycles count. the 264 was from 66 cpu's * 4 cores each. from the dmips specs 1 intel i7 core seems to be about 20x faster then a Cortex-A7, so the system here would be about the same as a workstation with 13 intel i7 cores. the 'about 20x' part is tricky and would likely take testing for a particular application. also speed depends on the bottle neck, the system here has 66 separate paths to 66 separate main memory, and the intel workstation only has 1 (or 2).

That thing is a lot more powerfull then a desktop. I agree it's no super computer, but it does have 264 900MHz Cortex-A7 cores. and woud be a good test bed for bigger 10000+ core systems.

my point was that i am not concerned about the matter, not that i though that was a serious issue. even wrist watches will likely be 64 bit by then :)

if the thing is still using the old 32 bit time routines based on seconds from 1970. that would fail at around 2032.