The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 4/16/09 Section: Verve

On Monday, Dan Reed, one of the top computing strategists in the country from Microsoft, gave a guest lecture in the Lory Student Center about the future of computing technology.

Despite the fact that much of the audience was either twice our age or a computer science major who barely made it out of their cave to join us, the lecture was far more relevant to our futures than any of your -- our loyal reader -- average 10 a.m. classes. 

Possibly what struck us the most about the topics of discussion in general was the massive scale of the changes that Microsoft and the computer industry are anticipating. Reed addressed topics as broad as (brace yourself for geek jargon) parallel processing, multi-cores, power optimization for data centers, Atom processors used en masse and infrastructure in general (for those now rejoining us, welcome back; for the rest, yes the lecture was just like camping -- intense). 

We will more than likely be covering many of the topics that Reed covered in our column over the next few weeks, as it was such a great insight into where our future lies.   For those of you who don't know what is meant by a multi-core processor, here's a quick rundown.

Every decision, or thought, your computer makes is more or less controlled by your central processing unit, or CPU. It's your computers brain on a one-inch chip. Over the past few decades we've tried to make the brains faster and faster, but we soon realized that no matter how fast we got, two brains are better than one.

Around 2001, companies like Intel, AMD and IBM all started producing multi-core processors, starting with the dual core and making their way to the quad core currently used in today's high-end workstations.

Continued...

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