The computationally heavy part of a web browser is the rendering/video engine, which is standard super parallel graphics stuff. Web servers are dominantly I/O

The computationally heavy part of a web browser is the rendering/video engine, which is standard super parallel graphics stuff. Web servers are dominantly I/O (or running wastefully slow scripting languages). I know it's all a fantasy now, but I wonder what the world might have been like if there wasn't such a split between what you can only do on a CPU and what you can only do on a GPU. Maybe you like heterogeneous computing and gluing C++ to CUDA, but I think it's ugly. Stretch outside of the current box a little bit and imagine a hybrid somewhere in the middle ground of CPUs and GPUs. I think a variable sized VLIW could've gotten there if the market had any more imagination than it does. It's Ford's "faster horses" problem.