Why You';re Not Getting Your Money';s Worth Out of That New CPU

newcfd

Multicore CPUs like Intel';s Core 2 Extreme and AMD';s dual-core Athlon 64 have brought about better performance, better power management, and a way for the industry to free itself from a slavish devotion to sheer clock speed.
But multicore CPU architectures are creating a nightmare for programmers, particularly those who want to take full advantage of the new chips'; power. The upshot? Much of your brand-new CPU';s potential, like an uneducated brain, is going to waste.
That';s quite a change from the days when the industry was fixated on clock speed. In those days, developers got a "free ride," says Jerry Bautista, director of technology management for Intel';s Microprocessor Technology Lab.
"Even if (programmers) did nothing and the clock speed doubled, their software would run significantly faster," Bautista says of the days when the megahertz wars raged. "When we go down the path of parallelism, that free ride is over."
Help is finally on the way. The chip industry is sending out the cavalry ... in the form of new development tools.
In general, "multicore" chips include two or more cores -- the central processing units of a chip -- on a single piece of silicon. This allows properly coded software to break computing tasks down into separate pieces, known as "threads," and process the threads simultaneously, in parallel, instead of sequentially, as older single-core chips require.
Although multicore platforms have been around for some time in academia and research, it';s been just over two years since the chips were commercially introduced by the likes of Sun Microsystems, IBM, Intel and AMD. Now, as core counts are poised to take off with eight, 32 and even 64 cores, the software that will run on them is seriously lagging. With the exception of the gaming industry, the vast majority of software publishers aren’t programming for multithreaded chips.
Indeed, the potential benefits of multicore chips are rendered obsolete if the software itself isn';t coded to take advantage of its primary selling point: namely, parallelism.
Put another way, for the software to run at maximum speed, programmers will have to develop multithreading applications that take advantage of them. As Alan Zeichick, president and principal analyst for Camden Associates notes, that';s hard -- hard, the way earning a Ph.D. in computer science is hard.
Typical 9-to-5 programmers, who are used to programming single-thread apps, are ill-equipped to handle things such as memory locks or calculation delays. What';s more, there are added complications like scalability: Code written for eight-, 16- or 32-core systems won';t necessarily scale up to work on systems with 64 cores -- like Tilera';s recently announced Tile64 -- or even more.

webmaster

很中肯的见解！现在的多核机上运行的软件大多数还没有并行机制，一边上网一边算题？那样是不是应该同时配两个显示器？呵呵！

newcfd

gcc & microsoft software compilers include OpenMP which can be used for parallel application on shared memory(not distributed memories). It is pretty easy for use.
http://www.openmp.org/drupal/

chigo2000a

真知灼见呀。看样子只有当其大量的。。。。。。