Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 26th May 2007 22:16 UTC
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."
Permalink for comment 243711
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-08-22
The compiler can't do a lot for you to help with multicore support. Generally speaking, you need to change the fundamental design of the software to do that.
About all I could really see Intel / AMD being able to do would be to provide some nice multithreaded matrix libraries for scientific use. That's one of the few things SGI has going for them to retain customers. They did a create job of it. They have libraries you can just pass a standard matrix to, and it will use however many parallel threads as you want to solve it.
Outside of that, there isn't much that's generic enough that Intel / AMD could do a lot for people.