New processors present problems, payoff

updated 8:26 a.m. ET July 23, 2007

SAN JOSE, Calif. - A fundamental change in the design of microprocessors is presenting software developers with a challenge — and a huge financial opportunity.

Chip makers are no longer racing to have the fastest microprocessor and have shifted their focus away from building chips with a single, super-fast calculating core.

Instead, to save energy and reduce heat, they’re putting multiple cores on the same chip — the equivalent of several computers on the same slice of silicon.

The cores run slower but are more energy-efficient, and are designed to break up big chores and work on the separate pieces simultaneously.

The resulting technology is ideal for the most demanding multimedia tasks, such as processing large video files, pulling information from multiple databases at the same time, or playing a computer game while downloading music and burning a DVD.

The problem is that many software applications weren’t written for chips with multiple cores, and the hardware is advancing so fast that the software runs the risk of being left behind.

“You can imagine a scenario where people stop buying laptops and PCs because we can’t figure this out,” said David Patterson, a computer-architecture expert and computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

As processors sped up, software developers tagged along by making their programs faster and faster. But now that chip makers are no longer focused solely on speed, programmers must change their tactics and learn to send instructions to different parts of the chip instead of through a single processing core.

Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are making their latest microprocessors with two and four cores, with plans for more in the future.

Intel has even demonstrated an 80-core research chip that is so complex that it doesn’t have an operating system smart enough to work with it.

Supercomputers and corporate data centers have used machines with multiple processors for years — with specially written software that enables, say, the processing of multiple Web searches at the same time. That inspired chip makers to build multicore microprocessors for mass-market PCs that began hitting the market in recent years.

The philosophy is similar. But software on the PC side has not traditionally been designed with multiple processors in mind.

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