Item — HN Reader

8 or 16? In 5 years? I think Moore's Law will get us more than that. Typical now is 2 to 4.

And while I agree that the most popular language will be something brand new, it's based more on non-public information I've seen.

I'm not sure I agree with your "superiority theory". Languages become popular because of the core problem they're solving. C++ was popular when Windows came out, Java when the web took off. The next big language will be able to handle multi-threading easily, so that when we hit 64 cores, it won't be a waste.

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8 or 16? In 5 years? I think Moore's Law will get us more than that. Typical now is 2 to 4.

The number of transistors per unit area of silicon doubles every generation, and generations of silicon are coming almost exactly once every 24 months now; so if the number of transistors per core and area of CPU silicon per system remained constant, you would see 8 to 16 cores per system 4 years from now. I'm guessing that the number of transistors per core will continue to grow slowly, so I figured the fourfold increase in cores would take 5 years instead of 4.

Larrabee is supposed to come out in about a year, starting at, according to some expectations 32 cores.

Larrabee isn't a CPU; it's a GPU.