Tech's Bottom Line | Bill Snyder » TAG: ISVs

March 27, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Multi-core to leave developers in dust?

TAGS: AMD, ISVs, Intel, multi-core processing, software development

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

October 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)

A War That Google Isn't Winning

TAGS: Google, ISVs

With Google crossing the $700-a-share threshold, it’s hard not to be euphoric. But wait a minute, says Trip Chowdhry, of Global Equities Research: “Google is not winning the platform war.” And that could be a serious stumbling block in the road to long-term supremacy.

First of all, Chowdhry is NOT saying Google is in serious trouble. But what he is saying is this: Becoming a platform is not easy. You’ve got to have the developers (the ISVs that is); and right now Microsoft, not Google has them.

Here are some stats he presented in a note to clients this morning:

• Total developers in world: about 8 million, probably only 3 million are “real” developers. The others are testers, release engineers, occasional fixers/maintenance programmers

• Out of 3 million “real developers” MSFT has an exclusive lock on about 1.5 million. Oracle, SAP, IBM, and other ERP folks have a lock on total some 1 million developers. “These guys are doing enterprise development, not the consumer web.” So we are left with about 500k developers.

• These 500,000 developers “are targeted by every wannabe platform” vendor -- including both SaaS Enterprise companies and Web2.0. On the enterprise side, there’s Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Workday, Adobe, and Nokia. On the consumer side there’s Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon.com, Google, Facebook and Bebo.

Remember, Chowdhry is not talking about employees. Google has no problem hiring as many as it needs. But ISVs are another story, he says. “Microsoft has the strongest monetization model. Google does not.”

For ISVs, he says, “Google is a concept. Microsoft is reality.”

Is Chowdhry right? Too early to tell, but given the hysterical runup in Google’s share price, it’s certainly worth considering.

I welcome your comments, tips and suggestions. Reach me at bill.snyder@sbcglobal.net.

Posted by Bill Snyder on October 31, 2007 12:32 PM