Vendors of high performance computing applications need to modify their products to take advantage of the escalating trend towards multi-core microprocessors, according to IT industry experts.
It is a significant challenge, they said, but companies that successfully navigate the shift stand to profit strongly.
In the past, computer chip makers raced to build the fastest microprocessor. High-speed calculating cores, however, developed huge amount of heat. With the increasing price of energy, cooling these machines has become expensive.
To meet the demand for greater energy efficiency, hardware developers shifted their focus to building multiple slower running cores that are embedded on a single silicon chip. A dual-core device contains two independent microprocessors and a quad-core contains four.
“Multi-core is definitely the way the industry is headed and software developers have to respond to this shift to remain relevant,” says Michelle Warren, senior research analyst for Info-Tech Research Group, in London, Ont.
She said large software companies have the deep pockets to re-align their product lines or develop partnership with key multi-core hardware makers but “smaller organizations don’t have the same advantages and are a bit behind the ball.”
To take advantage of the developments, Warren urges small software companies to “build relationships” with the likes of Intel and AMD or find partners such as resellers or systems builders that can help them accomplish this.
Cores in a multi-core device may share a single coherent cache at the highest on-device cache level as in chips produced by Intel Corp., or may have separate caches as in those made by Advance Micro Devices (AMD). The processors share the same interconnect to the rest of the system. Each core independently carries out separate processing tasks.
For years, supercomputers have used multiple processors with exclusively developed software to carryout mega-computing tasks or managed multiple Web searches. Their successes in this field encouraged chip makers to apply the same principles to consumer PCs.
The technology is highly ideal for graphics intensive gaming consoles but is also widely used for corporate number crunching functions and multi-media tasks such as seamless video streaming, extracting files from multiple databases or operations such as downloading music in the background, while playing a computer game.
There are a considerable number of applications that are able to run in the current 54-bit dual core machines and numerous users are already multi-tasking on quad core computers, says John Taylor, spokesperson for AMD.
Microsoft Corp’s current OfficeSuite products, Windows Server 2008 and .Net online development tools are built for a 64-bit environment, according to Rini Gahir, senior product manager of the development application platform team for Microsoft Canada. Gahir said some software products were developed to function in machines that carry out “sequential threading” while multi-core computers are capable of “hyper-threading” and execute commands and tasks “parallel to each other at the same time.”
Applications not developed for this method of computing tend to freeze up, he said. Warren agrees: “Microsoft and Linux programs are largely capable of functioning well in multi-core machines, but other vendors need to develop their line to deal with this issue.” She said in the area of service oriented architecture (SOA) there have been some complaints of applications having problems running on dual core machines. “Forcing some of these applications to share processing power are said to cause some bottlenecks and other unpredictable actions.”
Microsoft is already developing its server tools, system management software, SharePoint server products and office applications to function in machines that will have an even greater number of cores, Gahir said.
But how many cores do users really need?
“It depends on what you want to do,” says Jerry Bautista, director of technology management at the microprocessor research lab of Intel in Santa Clara, Calif. For instance, Intel recently demonstrated an 80-core research chip – so complex that no operating system has been built yet. The streamlined tiled core design is capable of carryout computations for such areas as fluid mechanics and air flow calculations, Bautista said.
“If you’re just Web-browsing or looking through e-mail, two of four cores will do,” he said.
Within five years, the Intel official foresees consumer products with 10 cores or more. “This development will herald the creation of myriad applications that will bring users greatly enhanced capabilities,” Bautista said.
Home users, he said, will have programs that can store, manage and search through tens of thousands of photos or mixed media files. Corporate users will have greater ability in probing large and separate server-based or online databases. Bautista also said greater core capacity can enable more natural interface. “Not only will computers respond verbal orders but will also recognize human gesture and facial queues.”
There will be some applications though that won’t need much of these capabilities. These software tools, he said, are applications that are already “limited by the human response time.”
For example, Web-browsing, word processing and reading e-mail, can only be accomplished to a certain extent as the human receptors are able to comprehend what is before it, Bautista said.