[js1138]

Within five years, entry level PCs will have eight cores or more, so why not? With multi-core chips, you could have an IBM mainframe chip, a 400 chip, a VAX chip, all native instruction sets, no emulation.

[Dinsdale]

Every one of those systems is a 'highly evolved' piece of software/hardware (read: It's amazing to the current group of developers that it works at all. There are parts of the source that they just don't touch as they know they will break stuff that will give them headaches. And that's just the hardware/firmware. The OS's are much MUCH worse, all of them.)

Getting all that to work together will be damn near impossible for any group. Imagining the NetBSD team doing it was a bad attempt at a geek joke that I should have made on /. not here.

Besides for most desktop applications CPU cycles are already INXS. What I want now is a decent laptop with a reasonable screen and 12 hours or more of battery life. You can keep the extra cores, two will be fine for me for the foreseeable future (and I've been running 2 sense the Pentium Pro).

Virtualization is the way to go. Even if you had the resources to build, for example, dedicated Power cores for the AS400 you'd still be better off just virutalizing the thing. Getting the actual hardware of all those platforms to share a bus would be impossible (and I don't use the word lightly).