Intel: Software needs to heed Moore's Law

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Hypocrisy from Intel

For many years, Intel sponsored contests for applications that would consume more CPU cycles. They eliminated hardware that would offer a different and simple kind of parallelism. One example is the chips used in sound cards. They have now been replaced by software algorithms. As a result, sound processing is no longer offloaded from the CPU, but creates an even greater workload for the system.

There is a strong need for greater parallelism in applications and systems software. You won't see it coming from the Wintel paradigm. Look for it on your Linux box. How many times have you been told that you can't start an email message now because a dialog window for a different email message is open in a different application?

That kind of problem is due to laziness in the way that the applications and the operating system are designed. They use staticly allocated data structures that are, at best, serially re-entrant. Every application and every operating system service should be mulitple re-entrant. That is, that many copies can be running at the same time without interfering with one another due to bad design.

Why isn't the hardware tracking the pattern of paging in the startup pages of an application (and the CPU cache loading) and storing that information to speedup the next invocation of the application and/or the next execution of a thread?

It also takes great hardware support to offload the mundane tasks to simple hardware that can handle modems, sound cards, USB drivers, RAID capabilities and virtualization while supporting multiple threads/users. We don't need contests to see who can soak up CPU cycles, we need contests to see who can be most efficient in using memory (small is better!), CPU cycles and minimize input/output interactions (e.g., remapping a memory block from system space to user space rather than copying the data from one to the other).

Posted by: Robert.Novak@...   Posted on: 05/25/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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