Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust
REDMOND, Wash. — When he was chief executive of Intel in the 1990s, Andrew S. Grove would often talk about the "software spiral" — the interplay between ever-faster microprocessor chips and software that required ever more computing power.
Context & Ripple Effects
Andrew Grove's 'software spiral' — faster chips enabling more demanding software, which in turn sells faster chips — has been the engine of Intel's business for two decades, a history traced in Business Week's 2005 profile of the company. But the spiral is now breaking at the software end: hardware gains are arriving as multiple cores rather than higher clock speeds, and most programs are written to run on one.
Intel's own 2007 output frames the problem. In January the company promised chips that run faster while using less power (its roadmap of faster, lower-power processors), and at its December Pre-CES briefing it showed 45nm Penryn silicon reaching everything from UMPCs to televisions. More transistors are easy to deliver; code that uses them in parallel is not.
First-order effects
- Software developers now carry the burden Intel's hardware roadmap used to absorb: extracting performance from multicore chips requires parallel programming skills most working programmers do not have, so raw transistor gains go unused in shipped applications.
Second-order effects
- Chipmakers like Intel lose their clearest marketing claim — a bigger number on the box — forcing them to compete on power efficiency and platform features instead, while tool and OS vendors who make parallelism usable gain leverage over both sides of the hardware-software pair.
Third-order effects
- If single-threaded performance stays flat while core counts climb, the industry's value migrates toward whoever solves concurrent software — and toward chip designs specialized for particular workloads rather than general-purpose speed, a structural break with the uniform-upgrade cycle Grove described.
The trend: Computing is shifting from a clock-speed race that software automatically absorbed to a multicore era where the complement — parallel-capable software — is the binding constraint on hardware sales.