A December 17, 2007 New York Times article talks about parallel computing and the need for software programmers and architects to get their act together. For much of the 90′s and early 21st century, it was software that was driving the need for more processing power. As this article points out, the tide has turned, and the software industry is dropping the ball.

What better chance for Microsoft to win back even the most discriminating engineers and developers by helping to bring the world of parallel computing to the masses. Three years from now we’ll have 10+ cores on the desktop, and we’ll depend on tools and platforms such as Visual Studio and Microsoft Office to helps us take advantage of this processing power. What can you do with all this power? Microsoft’s Craig Mundie muses:

“My machine overnight could process my in-box, analyze which ones were probably the most important, but it could go a step further,” he said. “It could interpret some of them, it could look at whether I’ve ever corresponded with these people, it could determine the semantic context, it could draft three possible replies. And when I came in in the morning, it would say, hey, I looked at these messages, these are the ones you probably care about, you probably want to do this for these guys, and just click yes and I’ll finish the appointment.”

In November 2007, Microsoft released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework, also known as ParallelFX, which provides deeper rooted programming model for parallelism.