MSFT has a similar initiative: http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/default.aspx nitro
On the windows platform, programmers should read: http://www.amazon.com/Concurrent-Pr...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224966260&sr=8-1 nitro
What is the cost incurred in producing a chip, or a core? Certainly not the input cost of material. So does it really cost them anything more to make a 16 core chip relative to a 4 core chip? The heavy cost is the R&D, tooling and retooling of factories, marketing, advertising, golden parachutes, etc. They want sales; that's where they get their money. First rule of business "How much do you get for your product? Answer: As much as you can get!" If they have 16 core processors they will start out at $1k-$2k or more for as long as they can get it but eventually will be $50 just like a Celeron 2.0GHz is today.
The material is immaterial. However the manufacturing cost is not linear. On a single core processor, if one core turns out bad, you throw away one chip. On a quad core processor, if one core is bad, you throw away 4. You get the picture... AMD tried to market a 3-core chip. Analyst speculate that they had a bad batch of chips, instead of throwing them away, they can sell them as 3-core processors. ;-)
Bottom line : if you are not sure that you should choose quad over duo, you probably shouldn't. Nitro: Thanks for the links, PLINQ looks very interesting. I think in the future we will see a move away from machine-architecture-specific programming (like C and its descendants c++,java and c#), toward more abstract and declarative programming. Multithreading and synchronization will be handled automatically by compilers.