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Then what about the people developing those software products? The article is very clear about this: "I claim that essentially nothing will change for the ave
by danieldk 16y ago
Then what about the people developing those software products?
The article is very clear about this:
"I claim that essentially nothing will change for the average programmer with the advent of multicore machines."
He does not deny that people writing web and database servers do need to care about multicore CPUs. And I guess it is mostly true, so many daily tasks are I/O bound that the only concurrency most programmers will see are separate GUI/worker threads.
Of the tasks where parallelism does help a lot, a substantial subset is embarrassingly parallel. E.g. we parse a lot of large corpora (Wikipedia-size and larger). Parallelization is simply obtained by chunking a corpus, and giving every CPU in the cluster a chunk. Then there are number crunching applications with data dependencies where just a few OpenMP pragmas can easily parallelize programs. Of course, there are remaining hard tasks which require more hand waving.
- phaylon 16y agoI don't think equaling "database using web applications" with "average programming" is being clear about the matter. Simply because that segment might not be immediately influenced doesn't mean the new technology won't be picked up. And even as a web developer, I often write more than just something I throw at the web server. Many web applications require cleanup scripts, batch processing of messages or static content, or perform some kind of statistical analysis on their data models. Given enough data, these are all areas where multiple cores can be relevant.