Blog: Multicore: New Chips Mean New Challenges for Developers

Multicore: New Chips Mean New Challenges for Developers
IDG News Service (11/04/08) Krill, Paul

The development of multicore processors is forcing software developers to work on getting software to be processed across multiple cores to fully utilize the new performance capabilities available in the hardware. However, this task has proven to be quite challenging, with developers struggling with issues surrounding concurrency and potential performance bottlenecks. Already, 71 percent of organizations are developing multithreaded applications for multicore hardware, according to a recent IDC survey. IDC analyst Melinda Ballou says developers need to approach multicore with a level of commitment to better practices throughout an organization and from a project perspective. Multicore processors are becoming increasingly common as single-core chips reach their limits and as power-consumption issues become more important. As hardware continues to change, the pressure will be on software developers to adapt and capitalize on the new capabilities. Developers must learn new techniques and use new tools to maximize performance. Intel's James Reinders acknowledges that developing multicore applications requires a much more complicated thought process about software design than most developers understand. "By and large, the majority of programmers don't have experience with it and are in need of tools and training and so forth to help take advantage of it," Reinders says. Intel is offering its Threading Building Blocks template library to help C++ programmers with parallel programming. The Intel Thread Checker helps find nondeterministic programming errors, and the Intel Thread Profiler helps visualize a program to check what each core is doing.

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