"Intel announced today that they're open-sourcing their cross-platform Thread Building Blocks 2.0 (TBB) template library. While the company contributes code to open-source project like the Linux kernel and drivers, the opening of TBB marks the first time that Intel has taken a commercial tool and open-sourced it, making it Intel's largest open-source commitment to date."

This is a significant, yet small step, in the still long road towards pervasive parallelism. If it is going to be Intel, Sun CoolThreads, CELL/Power or something else, I don't know but I think that this field will evolve to a common framework over time. Otherwise, we will never leverage efficiently all this new powerful yet difficult to program CPUs.

See details in this ArsTechnica article.