I wouldn't put too much faith in the value of polymorphic computing on the desktop. Almost inherently by design a polymorphic computer will never be as powerful at a specific task as a dedicated processor would be because you will always lose some power in exchange for flexibility. The very fact that reconfiguration is necessary means there must be some overhead in doing so.
The "10x" number is stated but completely without reference to the workload. 10x faster than a quad core Xeon is completely unsurprising for certain kinds of tasks where even low-cost stand-alone processors can do the same or better. So without knowing what kind of task(s) they're talking about it's largely meaningless.
The main value of such a processor is for applications where the workload changes over time or where significantly different types of tasks would be performed and where both power efficiency and space are a concern. The biggest advantage for these situations is that you can use fewer discreet processors - perhaps even only 1 - thus saving space and power. But performance is generally not going to be the driving force for using this sort of technology. There's some more discussion on this here:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/21/2015245Note that Cell already outperforms the stated abilities of their prototype chip and of course it's already in production. Although I wouldn't pin a lot of hope on Cell on the desktop either, you at least have a better chance of seeing that and getting better performance out of it than you do of polymorphic computers revolutionizing the desktop computer. They'd be great for palm or cell phone computing though, due to the lower power use and ability to perform for example GPU-type calculations when necessary...
- Oshyan
