Nanotech - The Circuits Blog

Intel has quietly snapped up two software companies in the last 30 days with aim of boosting development of applications that take better advantage of chips with more than one processing core.

In a company blog, the chipmaker indicated the acquisition of Cilk at the end of last month and then Rapidmind earlier this week. Both are small companies that employ under 50 people. The acquisitions follow the purchase of software company Wind River Systems in June.

"Over the last few years, there has been a gradual emergence of multicore microprocessors. It's put parallelism in more and more machines," James Reinders, chief evangelist and director of marketing and sales at Intel, said in a phone interview Friday, explaining why Intel bought the two firms.

"If you look at traditional applications, ones that we use everyday, it's fair to say that most are not exploiting parallelism--at least not to the full extent," Reinders said.

A multicore processor is defined as any chip with more than one processing core. Today, almost all Intel chips that go into laptops, desktops, and servers have at least two cores. The challenge for Intel is to make sure that applications take advantage of all the cores--so-called parallelism. This has historically presented a challenge for software programmers.

"The operating system does stuff for applications in parallel," Reinders said, referring to operating systems such as Windows. "But considering that we can produce more and more cores every year, to truly get the benefit of what the future holds, applications need to change. And most applications haven't changed," he said.

The goal is to facilitate the development of parallel programming. "How do we help software developers tackle parallel programming? Both companies had teams of experts that had been focused on this problem. So, they're kindred spirits," he said.

Writing about Cilk in a blog, Reinders said Intel sees "great opportunities for Cilk to integrate with our parallel tools...including Intel Parallel Studio." The firm's technology enables "mainstream programmers to develop multithreaded (or parallel) applications...Providing a smooth path to multicore for legacy (older) applications that otherwise cannot easily leverage the performance capabilities of multicore processors," according to Cilk's Web site. Original Cilk research was done at MIT.

Rapidmind was founded five years ago as Serious Hack and grew out of work at the University of Waterloo. It boasts advanced technology for helping software developers with data parallel programming for multicore processors and accelerators.

The cost of the two acquisitions was not disclosed.

Windows 7 will be more than just a better interface. Under-the-hood changes will allow chips from Intel, Nvidia, and Advanced Micro Devices to ratchet up Windows 7 performance above previous Microsoft operating systems.

Microsoft on Wednesday said it has finalized the code for Windows 7, set to ship with new PCs starting October 22. Improvements will include how Windows handles multitasking, graphics acceleration, and solid-state drives.

Windows 7 will enable better performance for multitasking, graphics acceleration, and solid-state drives.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is working closely with Intel, whose chips will power the vast majority of PCs running Windows 7. A July 22 post from Intel's Joakim Lialias, Alliance Manager responsible for Microsoft, described how Microsoft and Intel "saw unique opportunities to optimize Windows 7 for Intel processor technology" in the areas of performance, power management, and graphics.

In his blog, Lialias focused on improvements to multitasking based on "SMT Parking," which provides additional support to the Windows 7 scheduler for Intel Hyper-threading Technology. With Hyper-threading, the operating system sees a single processor core as two cores. For example, a quad-core system would be seen as having eight cores, thus potentially improving multitasking--or doing tasks (threads) simultaneously.

Hyper-threading is back in vogue at Intel after being pulled from Intel Core 2 chips (it debuted in the Pentium 4 processor). Nehalem Core "i" series processors use Hyper-threading, as do Atom chips. Intel, in fact, now includes Hyper-threading as part of a chip's core specifications. The Core i7-975 processor, for example, is listed as "4 Cores, 8 Threads."

Lialias also mentioned enhancements to boot and shutdown times. "Our mutual goal was to provide the most responsive compute experience possible." (Lialias' blog was cited in a PC World article.)

Windows 7 will also do more than previous operating systems with graphics--and here, DirectX 11 stands out as the most highly anticipated technology. A recent AMD blog describes a "beast called the tessellator...which enables games developers to create smoother, less blocky and more organic looking objects in games." The blog discusses how DirectX has been redesigned "to ensure that it is much more efficient" at using multicore processors, such as the AMD Opteron chip.

Beyond games, Windows 7 has the potential to turn a graphics processing unit (GPU) from AMD or Nvidia into a general-purpose compute engine, used to accelerate everyday computing tasks like a CPU. Specifically, "the compute shader" can be used to speed up more common computing tasks. The buzz word used to describe this technology is a mouthful: GPGPU or general-purpose graphics processing unit.

In an April interview, Sumit Gupta, product manager for Nvidia's Tesla products, described GPGPU in some detail. "What that essentially means to consumers is, if your laptop has an Nvidia GPU or ATI GPU, it will run the operating system faster because the operating system will essentially see two processors in the system. For the first time, the operating system is going to see the GPU both as a graphics chip and as a compute engine," he said.

Gupta gave an example of launching an application. "For example, when you launch (Google) Picasa, that is completely run on the CPU. (But) the minute you choose an image and apply a filter, that filter should run on the GPU," he said.

Another beneficiary of improved Windows 7 technology: solid-state drives, which are typically faster than hard-disk drives and gaining ground in niche markets such as high-end laptops, gaming PCs, and servers.

SSDs will be able to take advantage of Windows 7 technology called the Trim Command. In a recent interview, Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, explained the significance of the Windows 7 Trim Command, which clears up free area on a solid-state drive.

Even when blocks of data get deleted on a solid-state drive, the drive still looks like it's full, according to Winslow. "Trim allows you to release those blocks for reuse and maintain the performance. Every drive will degrade somewhat over time. With Trim, you're able to stay more in that the virgin state," he said.

Intel is back, pitching its processors for gaming graphics.

The chipmaker will attempt to promote its silicon for sophisticated game effects at the upcoming Game Developers Conference in March, as it strives to make a case for quad-core processors in lieu of graphics chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

The pitch goes like this: "Learn how to easily add real-time 3D smoke, fog and other fluid simulations to your game without using up the GPU." That's according to an Intel Web page entitled Intel at Game Developers Conference. (The CPU is the central processing unit, or main brains of a computer; GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)

The session abstract goes on to say that the "source code to a fluid simulator optimized for multi-core CPUs...can easily be integrated by game developers into their engines to produce unique 3D effects."

Intel's argument raises the question, how should the CPU and GPU divvy up their tasks? In games, the CPU can handle things like physics and AI (artificial intelligence), and certain older games actually run some graphics on the CPU. Generally, however, the GPU is much more efficient (that is, faster) at handling most of the high-end effects that the gamer sees on the screen.

But there are exceptions. "Not all algorithms and processes map well to a GPU," said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "You have to have a problem that is naturally parallel, and except for the rendering of, say, a water surface and subsurface and reflections, the wave motion equations will run just fine on a CPU," Peddie said.

Intel may also be seeking ways to make better use of its quad-core processors, according to Tom R. Halfhill, an analyst at the Microprocessor Report. But, he added: "I need to be convinced that a CPU can do those 3D effects better than a GPU can."

Then, there's also the Larrabee factor. Larrabee is an upcoming high-end graphics processor due late this year. "I'm sure some of it may also relate to Larrabee, which will include x86 cores, if or when it comes to market," said Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat.

(This Mythbusters demonstration at an Nvidia conference is oversimplified and self-serving but it crystallizes the difference between CPUs and GPUs.)

In another GDC session, Intel is also pushing the CPU for physics and AI: "How can your game have more accurate physics, smarter AI, more particles, and/or a faster frame-rate? By threading your game's engine to take advantage of multi-core processors. Intel has built a threaded game engine and demo called 'Smoke' that shows one way of achieving this goal," the abstract states.

It continues: "This presentation examines the Smoke architecture and how it is designed to take advantage of all CPU cores available within a system. It does this by executing different functional and data blocks in parallel to utilize all available cores."

Intel won't stop there. It will also focus on the bane of many PC game developers: gaming on Intel integrated graphics silicon--a relatively low-performance platform that prohibits game titles from being displayed in all their glory at higher resolutions. The session will focus on "programming for scalable graphics applications" and cover "performance considerations when programming for integrated graphics in general with specific tips for Intel Integrated graphics."

Intel is telling software developers to start thinking about not just tens but thousands of processing cores.

Intel Tera-scale multicore research

(Credit: Intel)

Intel currently offers quad-core processors and is expected to bring out a Nehalem processor in the fourth quarter that uses as many as eight cores.

But the chipmaker is now thinking well beyond the traditional processor in a PC or server. Jerry Bautista, the co-director of the Tera-scale Computing Research Program at Intel, recently said that in a graphics-intensive environment the more cores Intel can build the better. "The more cores we have the better. Provided that we can supply memory bandwidth to the device."

On Monday, an Intel engineer took this a step further. Writing in a blog, Anwar Ghuloum, a principal engineer with Intel's Microprocessor Technology Lab, said: "Ultimately, the advice I'll offer is that...developers should start thinking about tens, hundreds, and thousands of cores now."

He said that Intel faces a challenge in "explaining how to tap into this performance." He continues: "Sometimes, the developers are trying to do the minimal amount of work they need to do to tap dual- and quad-core performance...I suppose this was the branch most discussions took a couple of years ago."

Now, however, Intel is increasingly "discussing how to scale performance to core counts that we aren't yet shipping...Dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of cores are not unusual design points around which the conversations meander," he said.

He says that the more radical programming path to tap into many processing cores "presents the 'opportunity' for a major refactoring of their code base, including changes in languages, libraries, and engineering methodologies and conventions they've adhered to for (often) most of the their software's existence."

"Eventually, developers realize that the end point is on the other side of a mountain of silicon innovations...Program for as many cores as possible, even if it is more cores than are currently in shipping products."