It scares me... (Score 0)

...when people like google start to say that they're interested in anything other than increasing performance.

I realize it's their job to look out for their bottom line, but a scientific revolution is occuring now because cheap, high-performance commodity parts can be joined into the time-old slashdot favorite, the beowolf. When companies start saying they are interested in anything other than increasing performance, it hurts this trend. If the next generation of commodity chips stagnate WRT performance, scientists are screwed.

Where I work, we had about ~10 processors available locally for research until we got a beowolf cluster - it was just too expensive to get many more - now we have 48. And they're all damned fast.

You business types may not have realized it, but you helped subsidize science as intel, amd, and the lot competed to make the next record-breaking processor.