Star 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."
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Not exactly something new..
by ironfist on Sun 27th May 2007 12:14 UTC
ironfist
Member since:
2006-01-17

Hehe!

I don't want to troll, but lowering power consumption to
keep the core cool, isn't exactly new.

The PowerPC has been about this for many years. They
were also way ahead of x86 when it comes to multicore..

Freescale's desktop-suitable offering is the 8641D which
derives from the G4 74XX series. The D is Dual -ore and
with just a few tens of watts you get 1.5 GHz per core.

IBM went the more powerful route with dual-core G5 CPUs
(970 series). Apple used these CPUs (970MP) in the last
PowerMacs.

AMCC just announced their Titan SoC with 2 GHz and just
consuming just 2.5 watt per cores. P.A. Semi are working
with their PWRficant series with dual-core, 2 GHz with a
max consumption of 25W.

http://investor.amcc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=244596

http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2006/11/watts-happening.html

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RE: Not exactly something new..
by hobgoblin on Sun 27th May 2007 16:22 in reply to "Not exactly something new.."
hobgoblin Member since:
2005-07-06

sadly, the powerpc just proves the idea that the best product will eventually win as false.

that is unless the X86 will suddenly roll over and die.

hmm, that happening would be quite the IT cataclysm...

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RE: Not exactly something new..
by rayiner on Sun 27th May 2007 18:33 in reply to "Not exactly something new.."
rayiner Member since:
2005-07-06

The Titan SOC isn't in the same league as any of the other designs we're talking about (it's a dual-issue embedded chip based on the IBM 440). The 8641D post-dates the first dual-core x86's (the Athlon X2) by a long time. So does the 970MP. The only PPC to beat x86 to the dual core game was the POWER4.

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