Multicore: Faster Chips, Slower Computers? · Aug 29, 03:09 PM
Fortune magazine has published an article A chip too far?
that explains that “The latest microchips have gotten so complicated that companies from Microsoft to Apple to Intel say software writers can’t keep up. The result could hurt computer sales.”
Senior writer, Michael Copeland, does a great job of explaining the problem in layman’s terms:
The change was set in motion four years ago when Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) and others reached a point where they could no longer make single processors go faster. So they began placing multiple processors (or “cores”) on a single chip instead.
That design, however, dramatically raises the level of difficulty for software developers. If they want to get the full oomph out of multicore chips, their applications need to break tasks apart into chunks for each core to work on, a process known as parallel computing. (Programs running on supercomputers have employed this technique for years to simulate atomic explosions or model complex aerodynamics.)
But programming in parallel is simply too complex for the average code writer, who has been trained in a very linear fashion. In conceptual terms, traditional coding could be compared to a woman being pregnant for nine months and producing a baby. Parallel programming might take nine women, have each of them be pregnant for a month, and somehow produce a baby.
You can read the full article here:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/13/technology/microchips_copeland.fortune/
— Published by Software Pipelines Alliance
Add your comments here
Commenting is closed for this article.