Four years ago, desktop, notebook and server-central processing units had one core per chip. The quest to push up clock speed and processing power led to dual-core technology in 2005. Yesterday saw Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) launch a chip with 600 million transistors spread over four interconnected cores, dubbed "Barcelona".
But not everyone is impressed. Speaking at the launch of the AMD quad-core chip, in Barcelona, Spain, yesterday, Fujitsu Siemens CTO Dr Joseph Reger said "it is actually not true that the more cores we have, the better off we are".
Part of a line-up of support for the chip that included original equipment makers such as Dell, IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, Acer and Novell, Reger agreed the time had come for a technological leap, but he cautioned it was not an end in itself.
"This is a good day for the IT industry," Reger began. "It is about time that we have a true, what AMD calls 'native' quad-core processor in the market. This is good news on all counts, in particular in the areas of virtualisation and core count.
"A look at the roadmaps suggests eight cores in a mere two years from now. Now, on a server with four processors, we are moving from 16-way computing to 32-way computing. We can see a problem coming here," Reger added.
"So, even though today four cores are good, and the problems we will face with many cores are some way out, it is actually not true that the more cores we have, the better off we are, just as it was not true that the higher the clock rate we have, the better off we are."
Hidden messages
He argued that the key to many-cored chips is exploiting virtualisation. "The message in the Barcelona launch is not just the core count and power consumption reduction, and performance-per-watt - this is all good - but for Fujitsu Siemens and our customers, virtualisation is the main message."
Reger warned that virtualisation is not free. "While we are doing all this juggling and wonderful tricks with virtualisation, we are spending computational power; and sometimes there is an overhead associated with that and sometimes that overhead is not negotiable. Therefore, it is key for the progress of this industry that we improve the hardware of the system and system support for virtualisation.
"You need to supply more hardware support because virtualisation is becoming more complicated these days.
"It is clear that in the x86 space, we as an industry, don't do a very good job in terms of utilisation. Virtualisation is the key to better utilisation and rivalling mainframe systems," he argued.
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