Author: Ed Sperling for System-Level Design Community
“From a distance it looks like a game of hot potato. But this version is played by hardware and software engineers, who normally don’t have much to do with each other.
The hardware engineers say you can’t get any more performance out of a single core on a chip without cooking it, so they’ve added more cores and tossed the problem over the wall to the software engineers. But the software engineers say that while they can thread functions across cores, there are very few applications that actually will scale to use more cores without completely rewriting every software application at each new process node.
Companies such as Intel and IBM and most of the computer science departments at major universities are feverishly working on this problem. Unfortunately, they still haven’t come up with a solution, and the reason isn’t because this is a new problem. It’s been festering for four decades, and so far there isn’t a breakthrough. Programmers think serially, not in parallel, and there is no magic bullet to automate the programming.”
