Gartner: Software Not Taking Advantage of Multi-Core Tech

Looks like software makers have their own sort of catching up to do, reminiscent of consumers constantly upgrading their hardware to run the latest applications. Ironically, according to IT research firm Gartner, users will be hard-pressed to maximize their hardware, thanks to software that has consistently failed to catch up to multi-core functionality.

Analyst Carl Claunch said: “Many of the software configurations in use today will be challenged to support the hardware configurations possible, and those will be accelerating in the future.”

…Part of the problem, Claunch said, was the speed of innovation in today’s chip design. Chips develop with more cores and each core gets more threads as well, adding to the issue, he said. Each generation turns the same number of sockets into twice as many processors.

The implied solution was that developers should be more forward-looking and start coming out with software that won’t impose any future bottlenecks on computing power. But aside from providing contingencies for future CPU technology (a projected possibility is the 1024-cores running four years from now), the challenge also lies in anticipating the so-called “soft” limits, which according to Claunch, “are uncovered only from word-of-mouth, real-world cases.” Looks like the performance and capability of current and future operating systems are crucial in this situation.

(Image from Wikipedia. Thanks ZDNet!)