Intel: Software Needs to Heed Moore's Law
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 26th May 2007 22:16 UTC
Intel After years of delivering faster and faster chips that can easily boost the performance of most desktop software, Intel says the free ride is over. Already, chipmakers like Intel and AMD are delivering processors that have multiple brains, or cores, rather than single brains that run ever faster. The challenge is that most of today's software isn't built to handle that kind of advance. "The software has to also start following Moore's law," Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said, referring to the notion that chips offer roughly double the performance every 18 months to two years. "Software has to double the amount of parallelism that it can support every two years."
E-mail Print r 2   131 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/dvj
Permalink for comment 243453
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[2]: Talk less and do more
by tsuraan on Sun 27th May 2007 13:35 UTC in reply to "RE: Talk less and do more"
tsuraan
Member since:
2006-01-16

You can pretty much forget about that unless you're thinking patch releases from Intel/AMD that will never appear in the core release, because of the GCC policy of not accepting platform specific stuff.

Could you expand on this? Every back-end to gcc is platform specific. Gcc vector extensions are heavily dependent on the target architecture. Heck, the entire -march=foo tag is used to enable platform-specific stuff. In what way is the gcc team unwilling to accept things that are platform specific?

Reply Parent Score: 2