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Guest View: Multicore secures the future of C++


By Patrick Leonard
May 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Conventional wisdom often doesn't quite align with reality. For thousands of years, people thought that the earth was flat, heavier-than-air vehicles couldn’t fly and the Chicago Cubs would never win another World Series (ok, two out of three). With the continued popularity of the Java programming language, along with C# and the .NET framework, conventional wisdom suggests that C++ is a programming language headed for the sunset.

But the ubiquity of multicore hardware, along with other trends, is creating a great opportunity to leverage existing investments in C++ applications and enabling new development possibilities where C++ is the best tool for the job.

Many C++ applications have been rewritten in Java since that language was introduced in 1995. However, many millions—probably billions—of lines of C++ code are still running production applications in enterprises around the world, because C++ is still the best option for high-performance, low-latency applications, as well as those used in many embedded systems and mobile devices. C++ is also the language of choice for developing apps for massively parallel hardware such as cell processors or graphical processing units.

As you undoubtedly know, major chip vendors essentially have halted the regular increase in CPU clock speeds that reigned for more than a half century in response to such issues as power consumption, heat output and the unpredictability of quantum physics (to paraphrase Einstein, CPUs shouldn't play dice). Instead, chip companies are using multicore architectures to increase processing power instead of clock speeds. Though this is a logical move, single-threaded applications cannot take advantage of the processing power on those additional cores, and they often even run slower because of reduced clock speeds in multicore CPUs. That sets up the multicore dilemma, in which many applications don’t automatically run faster on multicore servers and, in some cases, they actually run slower.

Although there are slight differences between programming languages and frameworks, in general, the multicore dilemma applies across the board: Java, C#, C++, etc. This is why Microsoft, Intel, AMD and other major players are investing in research intended to lead to the next generation of programming environments. The reality for any software application is that to benefit from multicore, the application either must be written to be multithreaded or be in a container that can effectively make it multithreaded.

Related Search Term(s): Multicore

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