Multicore Makes Major Daily News

I've been writing about the multicore chip revolution and how it will affect software developers for about a year now over at DevX.com's Intel-sponsored portal, Go Parallel. This is the first piece I've seen in the New York Times on the topic. I sure would like to know if this was the result of a PR pitch from Microsoft. I'd be willing to bet it is, given the Redmond focus. Not that it's not newsworthy, but it would be nice to see something like this appear in the mainstream because developers themselves were wrestling with it, not because software vendors were pitching their solutions to the new paradigm.

Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust

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The chip industry will continue to be able to add more transistors to a silicon chip for the foreseeable future, but the problem lies in the amount of power they consume and thus the amount of heat generated. That will limit the rate at which processing speeds increase.

The need to get around what the industry is calling the “power wall” has touched off a frantic hunt for new computing languages, as well as new ways to automatically break up problems so they can be solved more quickly in parallel.

Although the Microsoft effort was started about five years ago by Craig Mundie, one of the company’s three chief technical officers, it picked up speed recently with the hiring of a number of experts from the supercomputing industry and academia.

Mr. Mundie himself is a veteran of previous efforts in the supercomputer industry during the 1980s and 1990s to make breakthroughs in parallel computing. “I’m happy that by hiring a bunch of old hands, who have been through these wars for 10 or 20 years, we at least have a nucleus of people who kind of know what’s possible and what isn’t,” he said.

The more recent arrivals at Microsoft include luminaries like Burton Smith, a supercomputer designer whose ideas on parallel computing have been widely adopted, and Dan Reed, an expert on parallel computing.

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