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**********************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.

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Each time there is a breakthrough like this someone comes up with an application that adds to the capability and usefulness of these machines. The last big application of this sort, I would suggest, is the World Wide Web and you must admit that that was a whopper in terms of societal and worldwide impact.

What do I hope to eventually see? Well if you've ever watched Star Trek, you've probably noticed how everyone speaks English -- Klingons, Romulans, even Scotty. It's their universal voice translation computers that made it possible. Personally I think multiple cores will eventually lead to something like that. After all, it is within the realm of eventual possibility.

You speak in one language; the exact and audible translation comes out in another language. There is your killer application for multi-core.

Think of the potential. Think of the shopping!

You will never be able to use all the power.

The problem with multi-CP type technologies is nothing new. IBM worked on it for years with their multi-processors.

There are certain functions in the machine that HAVE to occur single-threaded. Like storage acquisition. IBM's solution was to design a hierarchy of locks into the OS. To do certain functions, you have to have gotten the lock to do it.

So they soon discovered that after four CPU's or so, the new cpus online ended up spending so much time competing for the locks that the percentage of processor time they actually spent doing usefull work almost went to single digits.

Big Blue has recently redesigned some of the lock stuff, and replaced some of it with hardware, and now supports complexes up 32 CP's, IIRC.

But the problem will never go away. Every processor you add spends more time waiting. You get to a point of diminishing returns where you spend more time trying to manage what the processor is doing than doing any true, usefull work with it.