In previous posts on this blog, Berkeley’s David Patterson, Intel’s Andrew Chien, and Microsoft’s Dan Reed presented their views on why research advances are needed to overcome the problems posed by multicore processors. In this piece — the fourth (and possibly final) entry in the series -– Marc Snir from UIUC argues that there are major challenges facing us but yet, the sky is not falling. — The CCC blog has published a couple of articles on the multi-core challenge, all emphasizing the difficulty of making parallel programming prevalent and, hence, the difficulty of leveraging multi-core systems in mass markets. The challenge is, indeed, significant and requires important investments in […]

In previous posts on this blog, Berkeley’s David Patterson and Intel’s Andrew Chien presented their views on why research advances are needed to overcome the problems posed by multicore processors. In this piece — the third in a series -– Microsoft’s Dan Reed gives us his views on some of the potential benefits of progress in this research area. — For over thirty years, we have watched the great cycle of innovation defined by the commodity hardware/software ecosystem — faster processors enable software with new features and capabilities that in turn require faster processors, which beget new software. The great wheel has turned, but it no more, as power constraints […]