Mike Ball, Professionally

Many Cores are Coming

I went to an interesting talk today. Dave Patterson from Berkeley was talking about the near-term future and many-core chips. He’s talking about hundreds of cores on a chip, with perhaps a couple of heavy-duty processors to handle the serial parts of the code. They have an interesting wiki that pretty much covers the talk, so you can read it yourself. They also have a simulator, called Ramp, built out of FPGA’s, to let researchers get started before these chips appear.

You’re going to have to face it eventually, so you might as well start learning about it now.

Incidently, one of the approaches that looks promising to me is being developed at MIT. Check out the Cilk Project for an interesting approach to using lots of threads.