There's nothing like a big challenge to bring a couple closer together.
Such is the case with Intel and Microsoft, which announced on Tuesday they are jointly backing university research to help address the challenges posed by a shift to processors with many brains.
The companies are committing a combined $20 million to fund parallel computing research centers at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
For years, the PC processor just got faster and faster, performance gains that software could easily take advantage of. In recent years, though, chip speed gains have flattened out, while Intel and others have been pushing multiple processing cores on a single chip.
More cores can also add up to better performance, but to fully utilize multiple brains, software needs to be rewritten in ways that allow tasks to be split up and handled in parallel, a significant technical hurdle.
"The software has to also start following Moore's Law," Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said at a May gathering with reporters.
Both Intel and Microsoft have been working on this issue for some time.
In January, Microsoft announced it was setting up a joint research facility in Spain in conjunction with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie told CNET News.com in May that the shift of the PC from a single processor to one with many processing engines is "probably the single most disruptive thing that we will have done in the last 20 or 30 years."
Tony Hey, Microsoft's vice president of external research, echoed that on a conference call Tuesday, saying the shift in chip architecture will "profoundly impact" the way software is written.
"We're really in the midst of a revolution in the software industry," he said.
From a marketing perspective, multicore processors are an easy sell. Two brains are better than one. Four brains are better than two. You get the idea.
The challenge is that a whole lot of computer software has been designed to take advantage of ever-faster brains, not a computer packed full of them. It's a particular challenge for desktop and mobile computers. On the server and supercomputing side, the notion of parallel computing has been around for some time.
In the PC world, software makers have been scrambling to find new ways of thinking as Moore's law is quickly taking the chip world into a realm where there may be dozens or hundreds of processing units, or cores, on a single chip. In its latest attempt to figure out what to do with all those cores, Microsoft said Friday it is setting up a joint research center in Barcelona with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
The BSC-Microsoft research center "will focus on the way microprocessors and software for the mobile and desktop market segments will be designed and interact over the next 10 years and beyond," Microsoft said in a statement. "The advent of many- and multi-core processor computing architectures will make it possible to deliver enormous computational power on a single chip, with profound implications for the way software is developed."
The center will look at new approaches to software design.
"To optimize the designs and interactions of multicore processors and software, we need to start from parallel programming," Barcelona Supercomputing Center director Mateo Valero said in a statement. "The way to deal with this multicore architecture challenge is to bring together computer architects and programming language experts."
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