Nvidia's recently appointed chief-scientist Bill Dally, who formerly headed Stanford University's computer science department, talked to The New York Times about heterogeneous computing, and more interestingly, Intel's upcoming Larrabee GPU.

Dally claims Intel and AMD are basically hitting a brick wall in CPU development, and are being forced to focus on more cores instead of higher speeds. GPUs, on the other hand, don't face these hurdles. They already have a head start in multicore computing and offer more potential for further development. Dally sees a bright future for heterogeneous computing, where CPUs will be tasked with less demanding, 'boring' tasks, while powerful GPUs will take care of demanding applications.

Dally believes Intel is not being innovative enough with its GPU design, Larrabee, and points out it is still based on the old x86 architecture. Intel argues the x86 instruction set will make life easier for developers, but Dally thinks it will merely take up precious die space, making the chip larger.

“Intel’s chip is lugging along this x86 instruction set, and there is a tax you have to pay for that,” Mr. Dally said. “I think their argument is mostly a marketing thing.”

Interestingly, Dally considered joining Intel at one point, but he says he decided against joining a company with a "denial architecture.”

“Intel just didn’t seem like a place where I could effect very much change,” he said. “It’s so large and bureaucratic.”

More here.