New Paradigm Shift in the Way Software Must Be Written

Now that processor speeds have been pushed to their physical limits, a new paradigm shift is taking place in computing, where processors will be built with multiple cores to allow parallel computations to take place. The problem is that most software today doesn’t take advantage of parallelism. A new radical paradigm shift is about to start in the way software is written.

An excerpt from a CNET News article:

After years of delivering faster and faster chips that can easily boost the performance of most desktop software, Intel says the free ride is over.

Already, chipmakers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are delivering processors that have multiple brains, or cores, rather than single brains that run ever faster. The challenge is that most of today’s software isn’t built to handle that kind of advance.

“The software has to also start following Moore’s law,” Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said, referring to the notion that chips offer roughly double the performance every 18 months to two years. “Software has to double the amount of parallelism that it can support every two years.”

But it’s a big challenge for the industry. Things are better on the server side, where machines are handling multiple simultaneous workloads. Desktop applications can learn some from the way supercomputers and servers have handled things, but another principle, Amdahl’s Law, holds that there is only so much parallelism that programs can incorporate before they hit some inherently serial task.

Read more:

• CNET News: Intel: Software needs to heed Moore’s Law