With plenty of people anticipating the massively multiple core CPU era, NUMA architectures in regular workstations, and all the wonderful developments in parallel extensions to development languages and software transactional memory to take advantage of them; I see one big bottleneck that looks set to defeat most of this on regular desktop computing: disk IO. My laptop is dual core and is always disk bound. Is disk going to keep up? How long before I can reasonably (just like dual core is very reasonable in a laptop) have multiple large solid state disks in my laptop?
Will they develop NUDA? Non Uniform Disk Architecture? In other words a disk subsystem that I don't have to micro manage that dovetails into NUMA. Once memory is exhausted the OS has to go to pagefile, but that page file should be held on striped solid state disks, and when that is exhausted it should be on striped hard disks and eventually very large storage on non-striped large disks. Or perhaps more like a continuation of NUMA where it would not stripe the disks but instead devote solid state disk volumes to each memory bank so that it's page file is closest and not competed for. That might not work though: if a thread and memory got migrated to a different set of cores and memory it would have to migrate disk data too which would be very bad. Better to stick with shared storage and striping.
Ramble Ramble.