3 ms·

> very important software partner are you referring to microsoft?

• ghaff 6y ago
  Yes. A senior Intel exec told me around the time multicore was coming in something to the effect of "Of course we knew we had to switch from frequency to multicore but Microsoft was terrified of the software implications of moving away from pure instruction level parallelism." This was of course somewhat self-serving given all the criticism Intel caught for being slow to adopt multicore. But there were certainly concerns about software support at the time, especially on the desktop. (In the end, it ended up not being as big a problem as some were fearing for various reasons. But it was a real fear at the time.)