Teraflop software?

Of the many “laws” I encountered in the course of writing Dreaming in Code, I think Wirth’s law (by the software pioneer Niklaus Wirth) is my favorite: Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Here is a contemporary instance. All right, it’s not exactly parallel; but it’s an example of the very common situation we encounter as hardware improves exponentially while software improves on only a linear basis.

This is from John Markoff’s recent piece about Intel’s demo of a prototype of a new chip-making technique that packs 80 processor cores on a single chip (the “Teraflop Chip”):

The shift toward systems with hundreds or even thousands of computing cores is both an opportunity and a potential crisis, computer scientists said, because no one has proved how to program such chips for many applications.

“If we can figure out how to program thousands of cores on a chip, the future looks rosy,” said David A. Patterson, a University of California, Berkeley computer scientist who is a co-author of one of the standard textbooks on microprocessor design. “If we can’t figure it out, then things look dark.”

Mr. Patterson is one of a group of Berkeley computer scientists who recently issued a challenge to the chip industry, demanding that companies like Intel begin designing processors with thousands of cores per chip.

In a white paper published last December, the scientists said that without a software breakthrough to take advantage of hundreds of cores, the industry, which is now pursuing a more incremental approach of increasing the number of cores on a computer chip, is likely to hit a wall of diminishing returns — where adding more cores does not offer a significant increase in performance.

I wrote about this “multicore competency” issue a couple of years ago. Looks like it’s not going away.

UPDATE: Corrected to fix a (happily) mistaken suggestion that Wirth had passed away.