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The Father of Multi-Core Chips Talks Shop

Posted by timothy on from the green-onion-layered-beneath-yogurt dept.

pacopico writes "Stanford professor Kunle Olukotun designed the first mainstream multi-core chip, crafting what would become Sun Microsystems's Niagra product. Now, he's heading up Stanford's Pervasive Parallelism Lab where researchers are looking at 100s of core systems that might power robots, 3-D virtual worlds and insanely big server applications. The Register just interviewed Olukotun about this work and the future of multi-core chips. Weird and interesting stuff."

4 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Re:First mainstream multicore? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Read more carefully. He created the Stanford Hydra in 1994, and the Niagara is based on this design. They are not claiming the Niagara was first.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. Re:Illogical, Donald Knuth is smarter than that. by cnettel · · Score: 2, Informative
    Those processors have all been part of maintaining the illusion of the von Neumann machine, and to maintain common interfaces between different pieces of hardware. What's happening now is that the model of a single instruction feed is breaking down completely, no matter what task you want to do, if you want it done efficiently. And that's for the very reason that the very smart people designing chips have run out of ideas on how to make them faster while maintaining that very convenient illusion for the smart people writing software for those chips.

    No one wants to write threaded code for computations, if it can be done serially. (Parallelism can be quite convenient for processing of requests, like a server, but even then most designs unless done with great care will contain synchronization or non-locality in one way or another.)

  3. Multiprocessor Programming by yumyum · · Score: 2, Informative

    I just finished taking a course at MIT on multiprocessor programming. It was taught by the authors of The Art of Multiprocessor Programming, Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit. I highly recommend their book, their classes, their expertise. They are now focused on transactional memory, which may make things a bit easier to program in the multiprocessor universe. Of course we can stick with course-grained locking, but as they pointed out early on, Amdahl's Law shows that throwing hardware at a problem may not be successful in upping performance by the amount you expect if the system's scheduler has no hopes of keeping the cores busy due to how you've written your code.

  4. Re:Well by maeka · · Score: 2, Informative

    Multicores in the average PC is just marketing.

    I'm sorry you do not have a need to run more than one CPU intensive process at a time.

    The laptop I am typing this on is 8 years old 2.2GHz celeron

    You are significantly off on your estimate of its age.