Future versions of Windows will have to be "fundamentally different" in order to take advantage of multicore processors, according to Ty Carlson of Microsoft.

"You're going to see in excess of 8, 16, 64 and beyond processors on your client computer," said Carlson, director of technical strategy at Microsoft, during a panel discussion at the Future in Review conference. Windows Vista, on the other hand, is "designed to run on 1, 2, maybe 4 processors," he said, referring to the fact that quad-core processors are now available from Intel and are on the way from Advanced Micro Devices.

The problem, as has been noted on many occasions, is that loads of PC applications were programmed with serial processing in mind, meaning that the performance of those applications increased as a chip's clock speed increased. That's not how it works anymore. The chip industy has decided that multiple cores are the best way to keep increasing performance, and that means applications now have to be designed with parallel processing in mind.

"In 10 to 15 years' time we're going to have incredible computing power. The challenge will be bringing that ecosystem up that knows how to write programs," Carlson said. Windows Vista is designed to take advantage of multiple processing threads, but not 16 threads. And application developers are even further behind in making the transition to the multicore world.

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"The software has to also start following Moore's law," Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said, referring to the notion that chips offer roughly double the performance every 18 months to two years. "Software has to double the amount of parallelism that it can support every two years."

"We do now face the challenge of figuring out how to move, I'll say, the whole programming ecosystem of personal computing up to a new level where they can reliably construct large-scale applications that are distributed, highly concurrent, and able to utilize all this computing power," Mundie said in an interview there. "That is probably the single most disruptive thing that we will have done in the last 20 or 30 years."

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