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."
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Member since:2006-06-04
Member since:2005-08-26
Stronger GCC support?
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.
Intel have their compiler and performance libraries already and AMD have only performance libraries. That's good enough for now really.
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?
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.
Member since:2006-01-11
GCC 4.2.0 (just out) is the first release to support OpenMP, something you want to learn about if you're interested in writing parallel programs.
http://www.openmp.org/
Member since:
2006-01-26
If CPU companies want their multicore CPUs are better supported by software, they must start by making it possible in the easiest way possible. Maybe enemies like AMD and Intel must join their efforts on this.
What about stronger GCC support? That could be a great start. I hope AMD collabores more in open-source like Intel does now.