IBM's Chief Architect Says Software is at Dead End

j2xs writes "In an InformationWeek article entitled 'Where's the Software to Catch Up to Multicore Computing?' the Chief Architect at IBM gives some fairly compelling reasons why your favorite software will soon be rendered deadly slow because of new hardware architectures. Software, she says, just doesn't understand how to do work in parallel to take advantage of 16, 64, 128 cores on new processors. Intel just stated in an SD Times article that 100% of its server processors will be multicore by end of 2007. We will never, ever return to single processor computers. Architect Catherine Crawford goes on to discuss some of the ways developers can harness the 'tiny supercomputers' we'll all have soon, and some of the applications we can apply this brute force to."

That's ridiculous.

[The-Bus]

I see no need for why we would ever need anything more than 640 cores per processor in the future.

Yeah, but...

[GillBates0]

Has Netcraft confirmed this yet?

Re:Compilers need to be better.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad that arm-chair computer scientists such as yourself have such great vision and wisdom to guide us.

Will you please share your secret on how to accomplish this task?

Re:Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Concurrency is hard!

Re:You hit the nail right on the head

[Wesley Felter]

The average consumer uses an Office product, e-mail, and a browser. None of these use anywhere close to 100% of the CPU for very long even on a Pentium 3, let alone on a 2GHz+ core in a multi-core processor.

Sounds like you haven't tried Vista, Office 2007, and IE7.

Re:Clearing things up a bit

[Anonymous Coward]

it's about the Cell architecture, for parts of which IBM holds many patents and makes a lot of money on licensing.

I see a worldwide market for 5 or six of these "supercompute on a chip" systems, tops.