by Ed Sperling
The introduction of multicore processors in a slew of battery-powered devices is an interesting development. The ARM processor now comes in quad-core configurations, and the Intel Atom processor is now shipping in a dual-core configurations.

We can only assume there will be more cores at each new process node, and probably more cores added at each rev of existing process nodes. But what do we actually do with all those cores.

Aside from threading applications onto two or even four cores, the extra cores are largely wasted. As Freescale’s Lisa Su pointed out, there’s a big difference between adding eight cores and getting eight times the performance. Or in battery-powered devices, maybe it’s a question of achieving higher performance and longer time between charges.

The glaring disconnect in consumer electronics engineering is that we know how to create the cores—and that’s no small feat—but we don’t know how to effectively utilize them. In the plug-in server world the answer has been virtualization, because very few applications are parallel enough to take advantage of multiple cores natively. Databases and some graphics applications are the exception.

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