There once was a time when 1MB of memory was something to be excited about. Now 1GB of memory is becoming standard and perhaps even not enough for today’s memory intensive apps and OSes.

One solution for a lack of memory in the past was virtual memory, where sections of the hard drive was assigned to act like RAM. Of course, we still use virtual memory today and with even more gargantuan portions of space, but back in the day it was truly needed to run games like Myst or to run intensive office applications.

We are now approaching a point in which having multiple processors or multiple cores on a single processor are becoming common. How long will it be before 10 or 20 core processors come out? And until then, perhaps we might even begin by having “virtual cores”, where a few cores can act like many.

Why would we want to do this? Well, why did we first start using virtual memory? Because applications started demanding more memory than most people had available. The same may apply to the operating systems of the future.

I can see applications and games in the future requesting a certaing number of cores for different aspects of functioning. A combat game might require 2 cores dedicated to graphics, 3 cores dedicated to physics, 5 cores dedicated to AI, and 2 more cores for the game process itself.

Some lucky fellows might have a machine with 20 processing cores and be fine playing the game, but others might have only 5 cores and need to simulate the presence of the others.

So is this idea sound or is it just mistaking how computers really work? Or… did I just let another patentable idea slip out into the public sphere? D’oh!

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