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."

Comments

Her confusion means that ...

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM needs a new Chief Software Architect.

To sum up:

[kahei]

IBM have invested heavily in multicore technology that is only effective for very parallel tasks.

However, not all tasks can be parallelized at all, and not all can be parallelized easily. This makes IBM's product unattractive to many potential customers.

IBM is therefore also investing in people to go around telling prospective buyers that sure, if the developers just build 'multicore aware' programs, then multicore will help them a whole lot, yes sirree. And sure, there's an element of truth in that in most scenarios.

IBM's investment has been successful enough to appear on Slashdot.

The end.

Translation:

[acidrain69]

"I work for IBM, and we've been doing multicore (well, multi-processor) for years. Buy IBM software"