Intel and Multicore Tools
by Tomas Evensen
Intel is releasing tools to help programmers to deal with multicore. See the news.com story: Intel: Optimize applications for multicore. In the the article, James Reinders states that "It’s not intrinsically harder to write threads, but developers need to get used to thinking that way and we need help from the tools." While I agree that developers need to get used to thinking that way, I actually do believe that it is intrinsically harder to write multi threaded applications. And I have the grey hair to prove it…
This begs the question, "Why is it so different to develop for multicore compared to a single core (or unicore)?".