Brain and brain! What is "brain"?

By Clay Breshears (Intel) (124 posts) on March 20, 2008 at 2:44 pm

This week I saw two news stories that got my knickers in a twist. One was in the local paper and the other was in the Wall Street Journal (online edition). The (Champaign-Urbana) News-Gazette article ("Intel, Microsoft to invest $10 million in research at UI") announces a grant that has been awarded to UIUC researchers to investigate how better ways to do parallel programming of multi- and manycore chips. The WSJ story ("Intel Plans to Pack Many Brains Into One Chip") give information from a recent Intel press release detailing the next few processor products coming from Intel (the Dunnington, Nehalem, and Larrabee products).

Both articles report on significant, newsworthy subjects. But, after my St. Patrick's Day imbibements (luckily I retain my ability to do long division), one of the last things I wanted to read was the phrase "Intel's...chips, kind of the brain of a computer" [my emphasis] while crunching down my morning granola. Later in the week, I see "Brain" right in the WSJ headline.

Here in Central Illinois I can understand the local paper feeling the need to bring a technical story down to the level of the soybean and corn farmers in the area, even with one of the premier CS and EE schools in the country located right down the street from the paper's offices. However, what is the lowest common denominator reader that the Wall Street Journal is aiming for? Surely their average reader would consider herself at least as technically savvy as someone that raises tofu.

I don't get it. I've seen this terminology used before, so this wasn't an isolated incident. Maybe I'm expecting too much, having been insulated within technical communities for almost 30 years, or I'm giving my fellow Man more credit than he deserves. I hope not.