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However, the Redmond company is indeed ready to ride the wave of manycore/multicore, and has been gearing up for the moment when 8, 16 and 64-core machines will become the standard. The consensus is that, in as little as four years from now, mainstream processors will be massively parallel. At the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2008, the company's Chief Research & Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie, indicated that Windows was following along with the transition to parallel computing.

"We actually started our series work to anticipate this change here in 2002. We've been investing to get ready for this real fundamental shift for quite a while. The OS will have to change to deal with the heterogeneous many-core world. Where you are today is just a transition point from single-core machines to - I'll say at a steady state point where you're going to have a lot of processors on a chip, but they won't all look the same," he stated.

Of course, the Redmond giant is not saying all that much about how Windows will be tailored to manycore/multicore processors, but a consistent collection of project codenames and Microsoft Research initiatives reveal that efforts are being poured into embracing parallel computing. And such scenarios are not limited to the company's current proprietary platform.

The Anchor of Single-Core Programs

Following the transition of Bill Gates out of his role as fulltime Microsoft Chairman, while Ray Ozzie took on the title of Chief Software Architect, Craig Mundie became responsible for looking beyond the immediate horizon, and preparing the company for the future. Microsoft 2.0's forays into parallel computing fall into Mundie's backyard, but the manycore/multicore vision is not limited to Windows. In fact, the Windows client is likely to be one of the last software products to make the jump, as it is firmly anchored into the single-core past by a world of legacy applications.

"The many-core world today is one where it's still a homogeneous, symmetric, multiprocessor architecture. Frankly, the operating system, Vista, does a great job on those multiprocessor machines. And, in fact, it's the same technology that runs the 128-processor data center servers. The problem is the applications. In the data center, we know how to take workloads and smear them out across those things, and you get good efficiency. But all the world's programmers were given a set of tools and a set of techniques for the last 30 or 40 years where when they wrote an application, they squashed out all the parallelism that was intrinsic in it. And it's that serial manifestation that limits our ability to use those additional cores," Mundie added.

The issue is not whether Microsoft can make the jump to multicore/manycore architectures or not. The real issue is how the company will accomplish the transition while having to drag along an immense environment of legacy software products and perpetuating compatibility. Windows cannot afford to jump ahead into the parallel computing era and to leave behind all the adjacent items that make it a platform, in the hope that they will catch up. This because consumers are not necessarily dependent on Windows, but on the environment of hardware products and software solutions orbiting around the operating system.

"And so today it's the applications that haven't gotten there, not so much the operating system. Both will evolve. The fundamental breakthrough that's required is to make it easy enough for people to do complex parallel applications that can use a lot of CPU in a client device," Mundie commented.