Intel has a gripe with the software industry. Is Moore's law becoming a software afterthought?
The saying "the more things change, the more things stay the same" was never more evident on Friday when Intel and Sun sponsored a roundtable discussion on hardware and software development for the press in San Francisco . The change was represented by the fact that Intel no longer makes single-core processors in favor of only multi-core processors. What has stayed the same, at least for the past 12 years that I
Follow @infoworldThe saying "the more things change, the more things stay the same" was never more evident on Friday when Intel and Sun sponsored a roundtable discussion on hardware and software development for the press in San Francisco .
The change was represented by the fact that Intel no longer makes single-core processors in favor of only multi-core processors. What has stayed the same, at least for the past 12 years that I've been dealing with Intel, is the Intel mantra: The software has to catch up to the performance of the hardware.
Back then, Intel used a subtle approach. Whenever the chip maker unveiled a new chip, it would have its software partners on hand to demonstrate applications of the future that would use every cycle of processing power put out by the latest processor.
At the roundtable discussion, however, Intel was more into the blame game. This time Shekhar Borkar, Intel Fellow, director of microprocessor research, expressed his obvious frustration by saying he had a "complaint" with the software industry for not creating applications that can take advantage of parallel processing.
"It is imperative that software has to double the amount of parallelism [it can address] every two years," Borkar said.
However, when asked later in the discussion what will happen if they don't, his answer was weak. He said if one company doesn't do it, a competitor will.
That may be true but two things seemed even more obvious to me.
One, the software industry has a lot more on its plate than parallel-processing-enabling its applications.
The industry is going through great change at the moment, mainly with regard to Web 2.0, and here the network and performance through the network is driving much of software development. See companies like Akamai, and Citrix who are looking at ways to deliver and execute applications in the network, and Adobe, whose Apollo project is looking at a way to create hybrid applications that start in the network and finish on the desktop.
The other obvious truth is that this is not a technology problem for the software industry but a business problem.
Intel's business model requires that it must sell its chips in the millions and so far the only way they have come up with to do that is to tout the chips' performance, and to a lesser degree, the power savings on mobile devices.
I contend that if the software industry had the same business model, it would have solved the problem of how to use parallelism in its applications years ago when it was first briefed by Intel and others on this technology.
