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."
