Microsofts manycore strategy

section: microsoft, for your questions: KezNews forum, 25.6.2008

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The post on Apple’s Grand Central multicore support in OS X.vi had some commenters claiming that Microsoft had already solved the multicore software problem. Far from it.

And Microsoft knows it Microsoft has a multi-pronged campaign to get in front of multicore. They’re hiring smart people and spending real money. They will have a response to Grand Central.

Only 2 questions: when and how good? Microsoft’s forte is software that enables the moderately talented to produce functional software. Enabling Visual Basic programmers to exploit multicore chips is no mean feat.

Update: The word “multicore” - and the fact that we’re successfully using dual-core processors today - has confused some readers. Yes, limited forms of parallelization are built into most OS’s and many applications today. But these don’t scale well even to quad-core processors, let alone to 8-core and higher, except on some specialized and tuned apps.

The focus of Microsoft Research’s multicore effort is figuring out how to effectively use “manycore” processors in single systems as well as aggregating many systems for scale-out performance. Intel will be able to produce 32-core x86 processors in a few years. It sure would be nice to get 32x performance out of them.

The industry should start using the term “manycore” to describe the technology. I changed the title above. End update

source: blogs.zdnet.com
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