Parallel Programming

In case you where wondering how far Intel is planning to go with the number of processing cores per cpu (from news.com):

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel has built a prototype of a processor with 80 cores that can perform a trillion floating-point operations per second.

CEO Paul Otellini held up a silicon wafer with the prototype chips before several thousand attendees at the Intel Developer Forum here Tuesday. The chips are capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second, Otellini said during a keynote speech. The company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.

This is just another reminder that anyone designing computation intense algorithms needs to worry whether these can be parallel. In the coming years we will not see a big speed increase for algorithms that can only run on one cpu-core (unlike in the past decades).