Intel has posted an article “Unwelcome Advice” on its research blog, advising software developer to focus on developing software for multi-core and terscale processors. The author Anwar Ghuloum says that he frequently talks to external developers about Intel’s on going research in multi-core and terascale computing. The discussion typically goes in one of two directions. The developer wants minimal amount of work to tap dual and quad core performance…and perhaps stretch it to dual or quad socket systems. The second direction is discussing how to scale performance to Dozens, hundreds and even thousands of cores.
Intel says that most mainstream application developers still go for first path and the advise to design software for the second path is usually unwelcomed. Anwar advises the developers to start thinking about tens, hundreds and even thousands of cores in algorithmic development and deployment pipeline. He says that similar choices should be made for libraries and programming languages. Last year Intel showed 80 core teraflops research chip at their developer’s forum. The reason why Intel showed a research project that was at least 4 years way from a market release was to give a hint to developers where the processor future was heading. I think developers must start considering massive multi-core processor for development of the applications.