Losing The Pringles/Mountain Dew Arms Race
Mark Lewin, program manager in External Research & Programs for Microsoft Research, said the solution will require more than inventing new programming languages as developers need to invent entirely new ways to build software.
"It will take a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of rethinking, but the opportunity is huge," said Lewin, whose group this week announced a $500,000 grant program for universities with innovative proposals for studying software development for multicore computing.
In a speech in May, Craig Mundie, Microsoft Corp.'s chief research and strategy officer, declared that "the free lunch to some extent is over" for software companies that have counted on chips going faster and faster. He said Microsoft researchers have been focused over the past five years on this so-called parallel computing, or tasks being performed at the same time on multiple processors.