A recent article in the New York Times discusses the many-core sea change that is taking place. The article is written with input from a few of Microsoft's researchers that are defining how Microsoft will respond to the many-core future. Interesting that the one scenario they chose to highlight in this very public article is this: analyzying your email to help you plan your day better.

Wow! Is that all I'm going to be able to do with a many-core desktop system, analyze my email. With all of the applications of many-cores, that is not one I would have picked to highlight in a world wide publication like the NY Times! Here is a blog with more editorial comment on the article.

Many-core systems will enable high performance computing for the commercial sector. It will no longer only be the realm of academic organizations or multi-billion dollar corporations. Applications such as fuzzy matching, data quality, data mining, business intelligence and so on will reap the benefits. Seems like a huge market that Microsoft could play into. They show their true stripes by speaking of only the consumer oriented aspects of their software. Too bad for them, lots of opportunity for others.