One of the most abused terms today is “core count”. Depending on who you ask, a core might mean a full-fledged IA Core (e.g. a Core 2), or it might mean something substantially less…like a small processing element with an … Read more
Generally speaking, you don’t want to deliver any kind of difficult news to customers, partners, etc. Some of us are lucky enough to talk to folks about the performance and capabilities of our processors, shipping and soon-to-ship. Some of us, … Read more
All the major CPU manufacturers have thrown their lot in with multi-core designs. The (multi-billion dollar) question now is how to program these devices. I can tell you with some confidence that we don’t yet know what the answer will … Read more
One of the constants valued by our developers is the backward compatibility provided by our architectures in the form of a consistent ISA. Historically, a corollary of this has been that legacy software has benefited from process and micro-architectural improvement. … Read more
One of the challenges of enabling parallel computing broadly is that there is (understandably) some inertia around migrating programming tools, build environments, and, generally, 100’s of thousands or millions of lines of code to new programming models or compilers (especially … Read more
One of the things my group does while developing parallel programming models is to try to comprehend the application programming models and patterns that our tools will be used to implement. We believe this is essential to any work on … Read more
I recently had a debate with a colleague about whether we should be investigating new programming languages for parallel computing given all the languages that have been developed in the last few decades. In the course of this, I made … Read more
Physics is driving a revolution in software development. For software developers, I’m sure it’s odd to think about it this way but the evolving trends in semiconductor manufacturing is going to have a profound impact in how applications, tools, and … Read more
Hundreds of GigaFLOPs are available in your PC today….in fact, you might even have a TeraFLOP in there. As someone who cut his teeth on a Cray C90 (15 GFLOPS max), this is an intriguing opportunity to dabble; for the … Read more
A few weeks ago, I blogged on why parallel programming is “hard.” My goal was to set up discussions by others and myself on the Research@Intel blog on how we’re making it easier. While we’re continuing to write about this … Read more
