Interesting Multicore Crisis Graph and Analysis

By Kevin Farnham (107 posts) on January 17, 2008 at 9:10 pm

I came across a very interesting blog post as I was perusing the Net last night. Bob Warfield, who writes the SmoothSpan Blog, which focuses primarily on SaaS and Web 2.0, posted a very interesting blog titled "Apple, MacWorld, User Experience, and the Multicore Crisis".

Bob seems to agree with several points that I've repeatedly made -- that there really is a "multicore crisis" and that there will eventually be an industry "shake-out" where the companies that are aware of the multicore crisis will benefit from their foresight, while companies who proceeded in a "business-as-usual" mode, failing to notice the necessity to multithread their applications/products, will suddenly find themselves shunned in the marketplace because their programs take forever to run compared with competing applications.

I've talked about why the multicore crisis has come to be. But, you've got to take a look at the Clock Speed Timeline graph Bob includes in his post to really understand how suddenly we reached the "can't get faster" point in clock speed, and how rigid that limit appears to be.

I'm really pleased to have come across the SmoothSpan Blog. Bob's focus isn't entirely on multicore and the necessity to multithread, but he's very aware of the problem and he's out there trying to promote awareness of this critical issue by executives and other software industry decision-makers. I've subscribed to his blog, and recommend it to anyone who has broader interests in the business aspects of modern software enterprise.

Kevin Farnham, O'Reilly Media, TBB Open Source Community, Freenode IRC #tbb, TBB Mailing Lists

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Categories: Open Source, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core, Threading Building Blocks

Comments (4)

January 19, 2008 2:16 PM PST


Mark		 I think the take-home message is that Intel understands open source and knows what it means to build a community around an open source software project )
January 31, 2008 5:56 AM PST


Rick (Vectorpedia)		 I do agree with you concerning the "multicore crisis"..........only the quality companies with stategic thinking will survive the marketplace.
July 10, 2008 9:01 AM PDT


JamesF		 I think Bob really hits it on the head when he explains that Intel and AMD need to find a way to exploit multiple cores so they can reach the speed ups necessary to sell people a computer very two years. This is why there is a new symbiosis between companies like Intel and AMD and companies like Pervasive DataRush that are making parallel programming easier and really taking advantage of the ballooning CPU cores. The developer definitely needs a new tool box to handle the move to parallel processing.
September 11, 2008 8:33 PM PDT


John		 We agree with Kevin's views and have just released a multi-core development toolset that we call BluePrint. It's basically a middleware but with a graphical front end that is then translated into runtime calls. It means that the programmer doesn't have to worry about the underlying platform. We've releasd a little later than some other solutions but that's because we wanted a tool that would generate for shared and distributed memory interchangeably. This means that apps developed for SMPs also run across networks, and will continue to work when the core count exceeds what can be achieved in a single memory space. I Hope this is of interest.

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