But when do you actually need to synchronize all 1000 cores ? It's not like 1000 cores try to update same entity at one time, work will likely be map-reduce style (and there are plenty of things to do with it, speech recognition, voice synthesis, image analysis, etc.)
GPU have different issues, separate memory space, esoteric programming tools, doubles aren't IEEE compatible if available, no ECC. IIRC they aren't even suitable for things like ray-tracing, CPU implementations outperformed GPU based ray-tracers last time I checked. GPU's grew out of special purpose hardware and it shows, I don't think they are necessarily representative of the future architectures.
If you had a x86 or ARM chip with 100 cores and different instructions for atomic operations it would be a different story.
I agree, the most useful parallel implementation is nearly always mapreduce or pipes and filters. At the moment, Clojure's not that great for pipes and filters. The STM solution is brilliant, but atm it's all or nothing. The Rust model of being able to transmit something which ceases to be valid on the sending thread would be a useful addition to the current semantics. I think they're still thinking about the correct abstraction for event streams.
GPU have different issues, separate memory space, esoteric programming tools, doubles aren't IEEE compatible if available, no ECC. IIRC they aren't even suitable for things like ray-tracing, CPU implementations outperformed GPU based ray-tracers last time I checked. GPU's grew out of special purpose hardware and it shows, I don't think they are necessarily representative of the future architectures.
If you had a x86 or ARM chip with 100 cores and different instructions for atomic operations it would be a different story.