After reading the article on the Googleplex in the IHT, it struck me that Apple and Google are going to be radically changing the processor market as they push technology forward. The biggest being (I suspect) a fundamental change in “what’s important” in a process. Instead of “processing speed at any cost”, it is (or will be) moving to “processing power per watt”.

There has been lots of this sort of background story for a while. The article in Computerworld about “Apple pushing Intel in new directions” is one. An article by the notoriously unreliable CNet on “Power costing more than CPUs” another. (The ACM Queue article An Economic Case for Chip Multiprocessing is probably the definitive…)

Natural allies – both wanting, for the own reasons, more zing for the watts. Apple for laptops, Google for their googleplex…