The 'Core' Problem [GENERAL CERTIFICATION NEWS]
By Ed Sperling
One of the biggest questions hanging over the processor world for the past few years is what to do with all those cores.
This isn't a matter anyone is taking lightly. It's one that carries huge ramifications, because without a compelling answer there's no reason for CIOs to collectively spend billions of dollars on new server hardware with more cores on each chip.
The basic problem is that chipmakers can't develop processors the same way they did in the past. If they continue turning up the clock speed with a single core (which is how they got most of the performance increases in the past) they'll literally melt the chip. So they've added lots of cores that run no faster than a single core (and often much slower), using the sum of the performance on multiple cores to achieve increases in performance. Unfortunately, most software doesn't run on multiple cores, so much of that gain is wasted. It runs on one core, or at best two, if some parts of the application can be separated into different threads.
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