PROCESSORS

Survey of Dr. Dobb’s Journal Readers Shows Developers Are Not Planning or Ready for the Shift to Multi-Core Computing: A new poll sponsored by PeakStream Inc., a leading software application platform provider for the high performance computing (HPC) market, in conjunction with Dr. Dobb’s Journal, shows that, overall, organizations and software programmers are unprepared for the industry’s shift to multi-core processors. The results, unveiled today, are based on the responses of attendees from a February 2006 webinar hosted by AMD and PeakStream on Dr. Dobb’s Portal. The results indicate that more than 50 percent of organizations do not plan to migrate their applications to multi-core processors or have not made migration plans yet. Results also indicate that the main stumbling block for organizations surrounds “multi-threaded programming”, the most popular software technology that allows developers to harness the power of the exponential growth of processor cores. More than half of the respondents said that less than 25 percent of their application programmers have expertise in multi-threaded coding. "What the market needs to grow its library of commercial and custom applications is a new, easy-to-use programming environment that makes it possible to write parallelized applications that can run across multiple hardware devices," said Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics. More than 70 percent of respondents currently use C or C++ as the predominant programming language in their installed base of applications. The PeakStream Platform leverages the majority of developer’s existing expertise, such as the respondents’ familiar programming languages, to exploit the full power of multi-core processors, including graphics processors (GPUs) and CPUs. Through the PeakStream Platform data parallel stream programming approach, software developers can use easy-to-learn PeakStream APIs to build applications that will scale to the future multi-core architectures promised by the industry faster and at a lower cost. “The results of the poll cement one of our principal beliefs at PeakStream; while the industry is looking forward to the power that multi-cores can provide, many software programmers and their organizations have not yet invested in the skills and tools needed to take advantage of that power,” said Matthew Papakipos, founder and chief technology officer of PeakStream.