Intel: 'Software must learn to do Moore'

After years of delivering faster and faster chips that can easily boost the performance of most desktop software, Intel says the free ride is over.

Already, chipmakers such as AMD and Intel are delivering processors that have multiple brains, or cores, rather than single brains that run ever faster. The challenge is that most of today's software isn't built to handle that kind of advance.

Referring to the notion that chips offer roughly double the performance every 18 months to two years, Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said: "The software has to also start following Moore's Law. Software has to double the amount of parallelism that it can support every two years."

But it's a big challenge for the industry. Things are better on the server side, where machines are handling multiple simultaneous workloads. Desktop applications can learn from the way supercomputers and servers have handled things but another principle, Amdahl's Law, holds that there is only so much parallelism programs can incorporate before they hit some inherently serial task.

Speaking to a small group of reporters recently, Borkar said there are other options. Applications can handle multiple distinct tasks, and systems can run multiple applications. Programs and systems can also both speculate on what tasks a user might want and use processor performance that way. But what won't work is for the industry to just keep going with business as usual.

Microsoft has recently been sounding a similar warning. At its latest Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie tried to spur the industry to start addressing the issue.

Mundie said: "We do now face the challenge of figuring out how to move, I'll say, the whole programming ecosystem of personal computing up to a new level where they can reliably construct large-scale applications that are distributed, highly concurrent, and able to utilise all this computing power. That is probably the single most disruptive thing that we will have done in the last 20 or 30 years."

Last week, Microsoft's Ty Carlson said the next version of Windows will have to be "fundamentally different" to handle the amount of processing cores that will become standard on PCs. Vista, he said, is designed to handle multiple threads but not the 16 or more that chips will soon be able to handle. And the applications world is even further behind.

Carlson said: "In 10 to 15 years' time we're going to have incredible computing power. The challenge will be bringing that ecosystem up that knows how to write programs."

But Intel's Borkar said Microsoft and other large software makers have known this shift is coming and have not moved fast enough. "They talk - they talk a lot but they are not doing much about it," he said in an interview following his discussion. "It's a big company [Microsoft] and so there is inertia."

He said companies need to quickly adjust to the fact they are not going to get the same kind of performance improvements they are used to without retooling the way they do things. "This is a physical limit," he said, referring to the fact that core chip speed is not increasing.

Despite the concern, Borkar said he is confident the industry can rise to the challenge. Competition, for one, will spur innovation. "For every software [company] that doesn't buy this, there is another that will look at it as an opportunity," he said.

Ina Fried writes for CNET News.com