Most software today is still written for single-core chips and will need to be rewritten or updated to take advantage of the increasing number of cores that Intel, Sun Microsystems and other chip makers are adding to their products, said Linley Gwennap, president and principal analyst at The Linley Group. Off-the-shelf applications will often run faster on CPUs with up to four processor cores, but beyond that performance levels off and may even deteriorate as more cores are added, he said. A recent report from Gartner also highlighted the problem.
Multicore Chips Pose Next Big Challenge for Industry
March 23, 2009