Sunday, August 23, 2009

Multicore madness

According to an article on the register all of the major chip vendors are going to be releasing details of their new behemoths at the IEEE's annual Hot Chips conference next week. AMD will have 12 core offerings while Intel will talk about their 8 core models. Do we really really need all this power? Shouldn't we just trying to be more with less?

Modern coders and systems designers are just spoilt. They can just write the clunkiest code with no concern for memory usage and when the client complains they can simply say "buy more RAM". All the traditional skills required for coding (and doing it well) are going out the window, simply go out and buy "Learn xxx in 21 days" and that's all that is needed. Sheesh!

Also, given that there still aren't very many decent tools or languages for even leveraging the capabilities of the multicore processors they're simply a waste of heat and electricity (in general). So, c'mon Intel/AMD/others get them brains working around these problems too!

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