This article (by Sramana Mitra for Forbes) is not directly related to multicore, but an interesting one about innovation and requirement of research relationships among business, government, and universities. This article also has a link to an interview (on August 20, 2007) with Anant Agarwal, one of the pioneers of multi-core processor technologies. [Interview with Anant Agarwal]

“In an ideal world, a capitalist framework would facilitate all the economic progress essential to civilization. Unfortunately, we don’t exist in an ideal world. Innovation, however, is among the areas where capitalism as we know it–private, free market, borderless and without government intervention–fails. And as it turns out, innovation happens to be the need of the hour.

The Internet, one of the greatest innovations of the 20th century, came out of the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and MIT’s Lincoln Lab, way back in the 1960s. But the notion of global interconnected networks did not reach commercial maturity until the mid-1990s, when the Web browser came into existence. ”

“Professor Anant Agarwal, one of the pioneers of multi-core processor technologies, has more recently spun his third company, Tilera, out of MIT. Tilera is based on research that I was myself a part of almost 15 years back, but multi-core computing only started gaining traction in the last five years. The R&D was done on DARPA funding, even though VCs have now funded the commercialization efforts.”

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Related Links
Extraordinary Times, Challenges and Opportunities by Dan Reed, Director of Scalable Computing and Multicore at Microsoft Research