Panic in Multicore Land

MOBE2001 writes: "There is widespread disagreement among experts on how best to design and program multicore processors. Some, like senior AMD fellow, Chuck Moore, believe that the industry should move to a new model based on a multiplicity of cores optimized for various tasks. Others (e.g., Anant Agarwal, CTO of Tilera Corporation) disagree on the ground that heterogeneous processors would be too hard to program. Some see multithreading as the best way for most applications to take advantage of parallel hardware. Others (Agarwal) consider threads to be evil. The only emerging consensus seems to be that multicore computing is facing a major crisis. [...] In a recent EETIMES article titled "Multicore puts screws to parallel-programming models", AMD's Chuck Moore is reported to have said that "the industry is in a little bit of a panic about how to program multicore processors, especially heterogeneous ones." Full article: Nightmare on Core Street."