A Multi-Core Future – Two view from the community.

By Aaron Tersteeg (Intel) (65 posts) on December 11, 2007 at 10:55 am

As the Threading for Multi-Core community manager I've been reading a lot of technical papers and blog posts about the hype and reality of the Multi-Core revolution. I'm living the Multi-Core life and working to promote it globally so that developers are building applications that run best on multi-core systems.

As I commented on in my last post, it does not appear that everyone is developing applications that take advantage of multi-core systems. Mark Nelson wrote a great analysis of the current state of the multi-core revolutions. He has some interesting views of Intel and AMDs approached to scale from dual-cores to 128-core machines. I agree that a lot of work needs to be done on the software side to deliver the gains that this hardware could deliver. It is up to the developer community to sort out the hype from reality. I hope that I can provide trustworthy support in this area and do what I can to answer your questions (or find the experts who can).

To add another point of view I suggest that you check out Michael Suess's Thinking Parallel blog that pretty much goes point by point through Mark's original thesis. I agree with both of them that the main stream operating system companies are provide a stable framework for the application to take advantage of threading on multiple core systems.

Please take a moment to review both articles and provide your thoughts.

Categories: Multicore

Comments (4) Comments RSS Feed

By Jon Mountjoy on December 11th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Interesting Aaron!

By David Stewart on December 11th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
From a consumer's perspective it would help if Intel changed the way they name the actual processors. I mean, Core™2 Quad, Core™2 Extreme, Core™2 Duo?? What does they mean?? Nothing to me. As a consumer, I have no way to know and no interest in finding out which processor is best.

What does that mean for developers? It means you have one less reason to build apps for faster processors. Remember the P4? Man, people were hot for the P4. I was at Intel at the time, and so were we. When you have that much momentum dedicated to selling processor speed, it is easy to find a way to build for it.

Just because Moore was right about processors doesn't mean consumers will continue to care about them. How much power do I need to use Google?

Shooting from the hip as usual.

By David Schwartz on December 13th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
I remember when the '486 came out, an article claimed that so much power would forever be relegated to the server room. Who would ever need that much power on the desktop?

But the applications came, and I think they will always come. Home users first used text-based word processors (what was a font anyway?). Then it was graphical word processors. Then word processing grew to the point where it included the kind of layot and formatting that only professionals had access to. Then people wanted to put images in their documents and produce publication-ready materials.

Then they wanted to edit sound. They'll be editing video over the next few years. Then HD will become widespread, and people will want to quickly edit, decompress, compress, and publish the HD video their camcorders will record.

I think, for the foreseeable future, people will want as much power on their desktops as they can get, and companies like Intel will keep providing more and more for less and less.

If you're a programmer, you *have* to get with it.

By Aaron Tersteeg (Intel) on December 20th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Intel has just released a performance info and benchmark data page. So if you want to know all about the fastest chips on the block you should take a moment to check it out. http://www.intel.com/performance/index.htm


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