Intel’s Charles Congdon explains Multi-Core

As promised, Intel’s Josh Bancroft is digging in to Intel for information that folks want to know.

One of the most interesting so far ( to me anyway :-) ) is a video with Charles Congdon, who goes into depth about Intel’s Multi-Core architecture, what it means for you, and what it means for the developers out there. If you have any interest in learning more about Multi-Core architecture and the promise it could bring to your desktop or tablet pc one day, I’d encourage you to check this out. It is a  long video ( 1 hour 20 minutes ) and a bit slow starting off, but gets in to the meat soon enough.

Here is a snippet and link to the video (Quicktime required):

Charles Congdon is a software architect at Intel, and in this 1 hour 22 minute (186 MB) video, he gives the best, most in-depth explanation I’ve ever heard about what the coming age of multi-core in general, and in particular, what it means to you as a developer.

The time when your app got a free performance boost when a faster processor came along is going away. Now, with the advent of two, four, and many-core systems, there are some pretty fundamental changes that have to happen in your applications in order for them to keep up. Parallelism, mutli-threading, being threadsafe, and more. It could be that one of your competitors ““gets” multicore more than you do, and therefore his apps perform better on multicore systems. Or, worst case scenario, your app could be just plain broken on multicore.