Valentin's Blog

I wrote about it before, but it deserves to be repeated a couple of times:

1. Processors are not getting faster at processing single threaded programs anymore. In the past you could be sure that the next CPU generation will execute any program faster - this is not true anymore.
2. CPU development centers around building more and more processing cores - hence all computing intensive applications that want to be fast need to be multithreaded.
3. Current programming languages and tools are mostly not well suited for concurrent programs. In the next years we will see a lot of development to address this shortcoming.

At FZI we just bought our first QuadCore machines - but obviously 4 is not going to be the limit - Intel already demoed a 80 core chip.

To learn more about this you can read the posts at O'Reilly Radar here and here. 

Google Video also has TechTalks about a proposal to add better control abstractions to Java (could be a simple step improve concurrent programming with Java) and about MapReduce - a control abstraction Google uses to more easily take advantage of multiple processors.

There's also an enjoyable video about how a modern computer game takes advantage of multiple cores (about Alan Wake, the new game from the makers of Max Payne).  

Labels: AI, SemanticWeb