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What if multicore is all wrong?


By Andrew Binstock


 Andrew Binstock
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June 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)


For the past few years, fellow columnist Larry O’Brien and I have been banging the drum for moving to multithreaded apps on the client side. The basic proposition, as we’ve stated it, is that eventually users will not accept versions of client apps that are slow because of a lack of support for multiple threads. And since every processor on the desktop has multiple cores or equivalent features, there will be no excuse for lazily programming in a single-threaded mode.

Larry and I then went in separate directions discussing solutions to making this transition easier, though we have both felt at various times that the OpenMP model was one of the easiest and most effective approaches to desktop threading.

Now that PC vendors ship sub-US$700 quad-core systems, our point should take on greater urgency. However, no one except possibly the two x86 multicore vendors—Intel and AMD—have the slightest interest in this issue. Chip vendors care deeply about this problem because their road map for the foreseeable future is based on adding even more cores to the processors.

So, if developers aren’t exploiting the cores and users aren’t pushing for them, the demand for chips suddenly could slow down appreciably. Only high-end software would make sense on the new chips. For that reason, Intel, AMD, Sun, IBM and others started funding new research projects to find compelling ways to move developers to the new many-threaded world. (For example, see their initiative at Stanford University.)

But, perhaps instead of trying to force the problem into a specific solution (developer adoption), we should re-examine the problem itself. What’s wrong with a limited number of threads? And is multicore the answer? In a recent interview with Donald Knuth, I asked the wizard the latter question, to which he responded:

“I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks. … I’ve written well over a thousand programs, many of which have substantial size. I can’t think of even five of those programs that would have been enhanced noticeably by parallelism or multithreading.


Related Search Term(s): Multicore

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