Multi-core gives software hard time

July 22, 2007 from Globeandmail.com – “A fundamental change in the design of microprocessors is presenting software developers with a challenge — and a huge financial opportunity.

Chip makers are no longer racing to have the fastest microprocessor and have shifted their focus away from building chips with a single, super-fast calculating core. Instead, to save energy and reduce heat, they're putting multiple cores on the same chip — the equivalent of several computers on the same slice of silicon.

The cores run slower but are more energy-efficient, and are designed to break up big chores and work on the separate pieces simultaneously.

The resulting technology is ideal for the most demanding multimedia tasks, such as processing large video files, pulling information from multiple databases at the same time, or playing a computer game while downloading music and burning a DVD.

The problem is that many software applications weren't written for chips with multiple cores, and the hardware is advancing so fast that the software runs the risk of being left behind…

But now that chip makers are no longer focused solely on speed, programmers must change their tactics and learn to send instructions to different parts of the chip instead of through a single processing core…

“The software industry would have been very happy if the processor industry could have been able to double performance every two years without having to go to this parallel world,” said Marc Tremblay, chief technology officer for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s microelectronics business, where he oversees the server and software maker's processor road map. “Unfortunately people ran into roadblocks, and the winners will be the people who can actually leverage this disruption.”

180 View – You’ve heard of Moore’s Law whereby the number of transistors on a computer chip, and thus its power, doubles every 18-24 months. The “Law” was first introduced in 1975, and for those of us who have been around long enough, have seen unbelievable progress. Although the article describes a disruption of Moore’s Law, it is also possible that by running parallel processes that we will continue to reap the benefits of faster processing as developers apply new techniques to take advantage of multiple core technology.