EETimes: "Both AMD and Intel have said they will ship processors using a mix of
X86 and graphics cores as early as next year, with core counts quickly
rising to eight or more per chip. But software developers are still
stuck with a mainly serial programming model that cannot easily take advantage of the new hardware.
Thus, there's little doubt the computer industry needs a new parallel-programming model to support these
multicore processors. But just what that model will be, and when and
how it will arrive, are still up in the air.
"It's a critical problem, and the technology is needed right now," said
William Dally, a professor of computer science at Stanford. "The danger
is we will not have a good model when we need it, and people will wind
up creating a generation of difficult legacy code we will have to live
with for a long time."
Dally said he would urge the industry "to start experimenting right
away and try a dozen different ideas to find a few that work." Even
then, he said, "the best ideas that emerge from that work won't be
perfect in their first implementations."
"The industry is in a little bit of a panic about how to program multicore processors, especially
heterogeneous ones," said Chuck Moore, a senior fellow at AMD now
serving as chief architect of the company's so-called accelerated
computing initiative. "To make effective use of multicore hardware
today, you need a PhD in computer science. That can't continue if we
want to enable heterogeneous CPUs."
I don't know. I just don't get the whole multicore stressout. The big problem in computing seems to be managing data. Lots of data. Zettabytes, like.
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