Related item:
JOHN DVORAK'S SECOND OPINION
Eighty cores and nothing to do, yet
Commentary: But next generation chips could lead to real-time translation
**********************AN EXCERPT *********************************
y John C. Dvorak
Last Update: 1:46 PM ET Sep 27, 2006
BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- During this week's Intel Developer's conference, the company's CEO told of a bold plan to produce and ship an "80 core" CPU by the year 2011.
Since this multiple core concept has just begun to hit the street one can only imagine how the software developers will exploit these chips.
Ah, yes, I'm guessing that only a few people are aware that whether a chip has two cores or four cores or 80 cores only one core can actually be used with most of today's software.
When we talk about multiple cores we are essentially talking about multiple CPU's that just so happen to be within the same chip. It's the software that coordinates and manages the chores on the chip and somehow has to coordinate multiple cores doing multiple things.
Currently Adobe Photoshop and a few advanced games are among the few products that can mange this chore. It's hoped that someday the computer's operating system itself can do all the heavy lifting.
But I can assure you that we'll have 80 cores long before the operating system software will ever be able to actually use all this power. The lag between software and hardware gets worse and worse.