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I really like the presentations and talks of Greg Papadoplos, but his blog entry about "the five computing complexes" is a miss in a collection of hits by Greg.

At first the internet is a collection of humans, and not a collection of consumers. It´s the old unterstandig of a few broadcasting company which controls the access to the communication between people. This time is long gone.

I think, that in commercial applications we will see such an consolidation postulated by Greg. But as soon you take the consumer into consideration, you will see that he isn´t limited to the computing complexes. Google, Salesforce and Amazon are company. The are in the consumer focus today, but this is not a perpetual state. Customers are a very epheremal good.

The model of the complexes is the old economy of large enterprises. The internet will bring us a completly different model of economy. The economy of the future will be a fractal one. Today the single most successful application in Internet is fire sharing. It´s a service enabled by the existence of a vast amount system in the internet at various people. Okay, the actual form of this economy is based on illegal transactions, but this is only the cause, because nobody found a way to commercialize it.

It´s my strong believe that the future of internet bases economy lies in clearinghouses that enables the commercialisation of a peer-to-peer-economy. They don´t have products, they don´t have interest, what is selled. They sell only rights. Rights to use a pair of shoes, rights to hear music or rights to read a book or the right to use a service. The way of distribution is irrelevant. The future of internet will be a serverless one. Or to say it differently: It´s full of servers. Every system is a server.

At second, there would at least one additional computing complex. The Big Computer of Europe. Regarding data protection regulations the US and Europe could not be farther seperated than moon and earth.

Jon Stokes of ars.technica wrote a nice summary of the stuff already known about the next gen core dubbed K8L:A quick look at AMD's quad-core Barcelona.

A really neat concept: Plugging a FPGA-Coprocessor right into an Opteron socket. The idea that came into my mind, was a Niagara with an opteron compatible interface as a web/transaction accelerator. Or the opteron for accelerating a Niagara on certain task. Mix and match as you need it. Running on multiple operating systems coupled with RDMAoverHypertransport for communcation. This would only the same idea like the one of DRC taken to an extreme.