I’ve been a bit quiet lately, but not because there’s nothing going on! I’m changing jobs in a few weeks time, and beginning a new adventure. More on that later. In the meantime here’s a tidbit from the world of High-Performance Computing, explaining a topic which is important to everyone in the industry as multicore CPUs go from being an exotic technology to becoming the default configuration.
Over on the Star-P blog they’re answering the question: “Multicore: Why all the Hubbub?”
If we tag 2006 as the widespread advent of general-purpose multicore (dual-core) chips and extrapolate with Moore’s Law (a factor of 4 every 3 years), that says 2009 will bring 8-core sockets and 2012 32-core sockets. And those cores may not be getting much faster from generation to generation, unlike the last several years, so delivered performance improvements will depend heavily on making use of those extra cores. In a computing world where parallelism was a niche technology until recently, this is a Big Deal.
It’s an accessible introduction to the challenges ahead of us as we move to multi-core architectures.
Technorati Tags: HPC, SMP, multicore, parallisation, parallel programming, concurrent programming
