Dr. Dobb's | Missing The Boat On Multithreading?

Missing The Boat On Multithreading?

It's been 18 months since Intel introduced the first dual-core desktop processor, but only a handful of ISVs have written applications that exploit the multicore architecture. And that's a missed opportunity for PC vendors, commercial ISVs, custom application developers and solution providers serving the mainstream business market.

December 11, 2006
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/missing-the-boat-on-multithreading/196602940

It's been 18 months since Intel introduced the first dual-core desktop processor, but only a handful of ISVs have written applications that exploit multicore architectures. And Intel's quad-core desktop processor will ship next month.

That's a missed opportunity for commercial ISVs, custom application developers and solution providers serving the mainstream business market.

"While dual-core technology provides compelling performance metrics, very few of our ISV partners have optimized their code for this groundbreaking technology," said Patrick Taylor, president of Dallas-based Proactive Technologies, an integrator who has served on Intel's channel board of advisors. "The business world is only conversationally aware of multithreading and has yet to take advantage of hyper-threading, which is four years old," he said.

"I'm not sure why they have failed to prepare for these developments," Taylor added. "One would think an ISV would leap at the chance to be first ready with a hyperthreaded application that ran well in a multicore environment."

Signs suggest a transition is quietly taking shape. With dual-core processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices now the standard in mainstream PCs, and second-generation quad-core processors set to begin shipping in early 2007, some ISVs are gearing up for the next era in desktop computing.

Most notably, Microsoft recently launched its first multithreaded desktop software: Windows Vista and Office Excel 2007.

Multicore technology is more than an extension of Moore's Law, the historical doubling of processor speed every two years. It's a new era in software development and business computing, said Herb Sutter, software architect at Microsoft, Redmond, Wash.

"If you look back over the past 25 years, Microsoft has succeeded in its mission to put a PC on every desktop, in the living room, on mobile devices, in making PC computing available everywhere," he said. "But the mission we've just embarked upon is putting a Cray supercomputer on everyone's desktop, enabled by multicore processors. That's the way supercomputers are architected."

Multithreaded databases and other server applications have been available for decades on SMP-based servers and, more recently, on dual-core Xeon and Opteron processors from Intel and AMD, respectively. And ISVs, including Adobe Systems and Symantec, have long offered multithreading in their 3-D modeling applications and security software that operate in the background. The applications optimized for multicore desktop processors are aimed primarily at digital content creators and designers who work with a massive amount of data, 3-D images and realtime graphics rendering.

As the number of cores increases, it enables new features like desktop editing of high-definition video, said Adobe's Giles Baker, product manager.

Boxx Technologies, Austin, Texas, for instance, is one niche system builder making a living designing and selling workstations with two dual-core or two quad-core processors.

NEXT: Microsoft moves on multicore.

But the power of multi-core processing is moving beyond the technical workstation to the business desktop. Most notably, Microsoft is beginning its transition to multithreading.

Observers hope that increased support of multithreading by mainstream business ISVs will usher in a new era of software design and new classes of applications not available on the PC in the past. This would drive a major PC upgrade cycle and widen opportunities for system builders and mainstream solution providers.

Some blame ISVs for failing to keep pace with advances in hardware, and many say this has stalled sales of new PCs, peripherals and services. Microsoft's five-year-long development cycle for Windows Vista is oft-cited as one key reason for stagnancy in the overall PC ecosystem.

Now Microsoft is ready to move forward. At the recent launch of Vista and Office 2007 in New York, company executives highlighted the significant performance benefits of running Vista on Intel Core 2 Duo processors.

When asked about the multiplying glut of raw processing power on the market, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer agreed software vendors have been unable to keep pace with Intel and AMD, and slow to adapt to multicore technology. But he hinted that gap is narrowing.

"Intel and AMD are giving us more power in a very different form than ever before. We kind of liked the old form of Moore's Law really well, which meant processor speed just doubled every year and a half. That was a really nice thing for software guys," Ballmer said at the Nov. 30 launch. "Now they're going to give us more cores, not just more processor speed, and that puts more burden on not just us but everybody who writes software to write it in a different manner that's able to take advantage of the power. So each of us is innovating, the chip industry and the software industry."

To highlight the benefits of the two complementary technologies, Microsoft and Intel hit the road together this fall to demonstrate to partners the unique benefits of running Vista and Office 2007 on Intel Core 2 Duo systems.

New compute-intensive features in Vista, such as its 3-D rendering, invisible search indexing, media playback and video downloading as well as other applications running in the background, such as SideBar gadgets and security sweeps, are enabled by and require multicores to run well, Sutter said.

ISVs must write applications that can scale to many cores, he said. Excel 2007's multithreaded recalculation technology enables advanced financial modeling in complicated spreadsheets because it splits up calculations among various cores, Sutter added. And it scales beyond quad cores to eight cores in linear fashion.

Partners hope Microsoft's new multithreaded applications and widescale availability of multicore PCs will inspire other ISVs to develop new applications.

"I imagine it will be this way until more and more applications are written to take full advantage of multi-threaded environments. We're talking about quad cores, but dual cores are just starting to really gain traction and acceptance in the mainstream market. I think 2007 is going to be a big year for computer resellers," said Todd Swank, director of marketing at Nortech in Burnsville, Minn.

"Absolutely, applications should be multithreaded. Most applications, including those from Microsoft, are not yet multithreaded," said Brian Bergin, president of Terabyte Computers, Boone, N.C. "Until now, the only way to get SMP was with expensive motherboards and dual CPUs. Now that dual-core CPUs are common, truly multithreaded SMP-aware applications can be written to take advantage of them."

NEXT: Forecast for multithreaded applications.Security ISVs such as Symantec use multithreading to enable virus checks in the background.

Parallels, Renton, Wash., will include virtual SMP support in its next virtualization application that takes full advantage of multicore machines by assigning specific cores to virtual machines, and applying other VMs to your "real" machine, said Benjamin Rudolph, marketing manager at Parallels.

"Right now, VMs work as single-thread machines," he said. "This is actually a very good thing for the average user, as it ensures a great balance of performance between your host machine and guest VMs. We've found that for most tasks, having one core for a VM and one core for the real machine is a good spread of resources. Virtual SMP will be included so power users can tweak performance as much or as little as they need."

Adobe's PDF Print Engine, announced in April, has a scalable, multithreaded architecture that scales in PCs with multicore processors and multiple processors, the company said. Such performance gains drive the addition of new capabilities such as workflow.

Developers will step up as businesses begin to appreciate the benefits of multicore computing.

"For business application developers, writing multi-threaded code is unusual. Exceptions to that might include heavy-duty real-time systems for things like stock and foreign exchange trades, where microseconds count," said Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at Twenty-Six, a Microsoft partner in New York. He said multicore desktops are better able to run multiple applications in parallel and allow more complex tasks to execute separately, while more mundane aspects of the application remain nicely responsive.

Microsoft's Sutter said it's "very" possible to write multithreaded applications, but software writers must find a way to assign different tasks to each core.

He said tools vendors will extend languages and frameworks to make concurrent programming easier. Future versions of Visual Studio will include wizards and make it easier to debug and profile multithreaded applications for performance.

Rob Hoffman, senior marketing manager at Autodesk, San Rafael, Calif., said single-core processors may be sufficient for running the applications out there today, but availability of multicore PCs will drive new application development. "Multicore is here to stay," he said.

His observation was echoed by Ed Carasappa, director of business development at Boxx Technologies, which shipped four of its first workstations to ISVs that develop multithreaded applications.

"We've seen new releases that are 64-bit and multithreaded. But there are barely any desktop applications that can take advantage of even a quad core," Carasappa said. "When will it become pervasive? It depends on what the business community does, but it's already happening for Microsoft."

One analyst said that availability of quad-core processors, PCs and applications next year should drive a major upgrade cycle.

"For now, quad-core processors are really only suited to a niche segment of the market. Quad cores are like exotic carsthey won't sell a lot, but unlike the car market, these exotics will rapidly become mainstream, probably within 18 months," said Steve Kleynhans, vice president of the Client Platforms Group at Gartner. "Having them in the market now encourages the rest of the ecosystemand specifically, the software makersto begin to design with quad core in mind."

"We are slowly starting to see more and more general applications becoming multicore aware, but generally multicore processors just allow a consumer to multitask better and run more applications without seeing a dramatic slowdown," said James Huang, a marketing specialist at AMAX, San Jose, Calif. "Multicore is definitely the future, but for now the hardware is ahead of the software."