March 27, 2008
Multi-core to leave developers in dust?
Multi-core chip rivals AMD and Intel have been beating their chests as of late, but to what end, I wonder, as developers labor to keep up.
AMD, for one, has fixed the embarrassing flaw that delayed the quad-core Barcelona chip. As Terry Malloy put it in On the Waterfront, so what?
Meanwhile, Intel and Microsoft pat themselves on the back because they've donated $20 million to UC Berkley and the University of Illinois to found the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers. Well, it's about time.
Why so negative? The dirty little secret (and it's not all that secret) is that the gap between hardware and software has never been greater. Today's software can barely (if at all) take advantage of quad-core processors, but Intel and AMD seem to be giddy with rivalry, rushing to push out chips with even more cores. Intel has already demonstrated an 80-core processor, and you can expect x86 servers with as many as 64 processor cores in 2009 and desktops with that many by 2012, says Forrester analyst James Staten.
That's not to say that the IT industry is scoffing at the potential benefits of multi-core processing. But the mountain between IT and some future multi-core promise land -- namely, the task of developing parallelized apps that keep pace with continual core advances -- is huge, says David Patterson, the Pardee Professor of Computing Science at UC Berkeley and director of the parallel computing lab. "It's the biggest challenge in 50 years of computing. If we do this, it's a chance to reset the foundation of computing."
In the short run, Patterson says, we can parallelize legacy software and gamble on getting value out of eight cores. But that would be only an interim solution, as such apps would not scale to 32 or 64 cores, he adds.
What is frustrating is that this problem didn't exactly sneak up on the industry. Chip development cycles are very long, and key software developers are well aware of what's moving through the pipeline. Sure, software always lags hardware. Many of us complained that we didn't have software that would take advantage of 500MHz back in the '90s. But what Patterson and others call the multi-core revolution poses problems for developers that are qualitatively different than the problems of the past. Why wait so long to get serious about solving them?
Making sense of the multi-core muddle
The cynical explanation for this growing gap is that Intel and AMD are running on a treadmill that requires selling more and more transistors to support the cost of developing and building fabs. As long as buyers are willing to spend the money for cool new hardware, who cares if they don't really need it?
Ray DePaul, president and CEO of RapidMind, which sells a multi-core software development platform, has a different take.
"The first multi-core chips were dual core, and that lulled everyone into thinking this is OK," DePaul says.
Taking advantage of the second core was relatively easy with existing software. But four cores is another story.
"It's the classic disruptive technology," DePaul says. "If the Microsofts and the Intels always got it right, you'd never see a Google or an AMD."
RapidMind hopes to avoid following in the wake of companies such as Thinking Machines and nCUBE, which attempted to build businesses around solving the parallel computing problem without success. I'm not qualified to say whether the RapidMind solution, which includes an embedded API to allow legacy software to take advantage of multiple cores, is viable. But I agree with DePaul when he says, "The business opportunity is far more mainstream than it was because every desktop is shipped with a multi-core processor."
RapidMind spun out of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, where co-founder Michael McCool studied the problems of parallel computing for years. A one-time competitor called PeakStream was purchased by Google last year. It's unclear what the search giant intends to do with the technology, though it may well use it internally to bolster its already enormous computing resources.
In addition to the business opportunity, there's an employment opportunity here as well. Developers who can handle parallel processing or concurrent processing are going to be in great demand. Indeed, UC's Patterson says: "We feel a sense of allegiance to our undergrads but don't know what to teach them. Course work is all focused on sequential [programming] problems."
I don't feel like doing the math, but I'll bet Intel and Microsoft earn $20 million in a matter of hours. So, yeah, I congratulate them for funding some research, but they and other industry heavyweights need to do a lot more. If not, maybe we'll wise up and stop buying what they're selling.
I welcome your comments, tips and suggestions. Reach me at bill_snyder@infoworld.com
Posted by Bill Snyder on March 27, 2008 03:00 AM
January 11, 2008
On a day when tech stocks are taking a terrible shellacking, Advanced Micro Devices stands out as a big gainer on the news that Intel is being investigated by the New York Attorney General's office for possible antitrust violations.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo served the chipmaking rivals with subpoenas as he looks into charges that Intel stifled competition and hurt consumers by pressuring customers to exclude AMD from their list of suppliers. The allegations are similar to those made in an ongoing lawsuit brought by AMD.
"After careful review, we have determined that questions raised about Intel's potential anticompetitive conduct warrant a full and factual investigation," Cuomo said in a press release.
But those charges, which echo years of industry rumors, won’t be easy to prove. In an interview with BusinessWeek, John Peirce, a partner at law firm Bryan Cave who specializes in antitrust and commercial litigation said: "Predatory pricing and exclusive dealing are a tough case under U.S. law."
AMD sued Intel in a Delaware federal court in 2005, alleging that the microprocessor giant has consistently abused its monopoly position in the market to prevent PC vendors from using AMD chips. A trial date has been set for April 27, 2009.
Regulators in Japan, South Korea and Europe (via the EU) are also investigating Intel’s competitive practices.
Intel has consistently denied the charges, saying that it never sells products below cost.
AMD has made significant market share gains in the last several years, but has been hurt by an ugly pricing war with its much larger rival. The smaller chip maker claims that its gains would have been even larger had it been competing on a level field.
In recent trading, shares of AMD were up a bit more than 7%, or 42 cents, to $6.38 a share, while Intel was off 54 cents, or 2.4% to $22.
Posted by Bill Snyder on January 11, 2008 11:38 AM
November 24, 2007
AMD and Cisco put Band-Aids on their wounds
When business gets bad, some tech outfits will do whatever it takes to protect share prices, even it doesn’t add a bit of value to the company.
We’ve seen two good examples of this in the last few weeks: Advanced Micro Devices, whose share price has tumbled following a series of bad quarters, gave the government of Abu Dhabi 8.1% of the company in exchange for $622 million in cash. Cisco, which is doing well, freaked the market with a warning that enterprise demand is softening, announced a $10 billion buyback of common stock. The buyback is in addition to $52 billion of previously authorized share repurchases.
In AMD’s case the ploy didn’t work. Since announcing the Abu Dhabi deal on Nov. 16, the stock has shed nearly 15%. Sure, techs have taken a beating lately, but AMD’s tumble is far more severe and the stock is now trading at less than 50% of its 52-week high of $23 a share. There’s nothing wrong with borrowing money, but investors figure that the cash infusion isn’t much more than a Band-Aid covering a deep wound.
AMD has been slugging it out with Intel, and the war has been very tough on the smaller company’s bottom line. I don’t think AMD is in danger of foundering any time soon, but Hector Ruiz and company need to do something fairly drastic before too long.
There’s even been speculation (see Eric Savitz’s column in Barron’s for one view) that AMD might go fabless and let someone else build its chips. Others have speculated that the company might sell itself to graphics chip maker NVIDIA, but that’s not very well informed. Since AMD already owns the former ATI, there would obviously be serious anti-trust implications.
Cisco is a different story, of course, but it's worth noting that buybacks are not an unvarnished good. Remember, a company that buys back shares is generally buying back shares that were created by the issuance of stock options. That reduces the number of shares outstanding and thus raises the earnings per share (simple math) but changes nothing except the amount of cash on hand. No real value is created, and buybacks can disguise a number of problems.
In an interview last year, Gary Lutin, a New York investment banker who gives advice in corporate control contests, likened such repurchases to a banker "giving away half of what's in the bank vault then buying it back and telling all [his] depositors 'That makes everything OK, right?' " (Lutin, a long-time source of mine, spoke during an interview with my former colleague at TheStreet.com Troy Wolverton.)
Cisco got a short-lived bump after it announced the buyback, but shares subsequently gave up all the gains and are actually trading a bit lower than they were.
Enjoy the rest of the holiday.
I welcome your comments, suggestions and tips. Reach me at bill.snyder@sbcglobal.net
Posted by Bill Snyder on November 24, 2007 02:53 PM
