Winner: Cure for the Multicore Blues Just three weeks before the 2006 Game Developers Conference in San Jose, IBM had a problem. The company desperately needed a boffo, unforgettable piece of computer-generated imagery to demonstrate the power of the new Cell nine-core microprocessor, which Big Blue had just developed with Sony and Toshiba. The chip, produced at a cost of US $400 million, was set to debut in Sony’s new PlayStation 3 game console in November, but developers who had been tearing their hair out trying to program games for the Cell’s new architecture didn’t yet have any seriously flashy footage to present at the March show. So IBM turned to the chicken wrangler. Actually, he’s a 39-year-old computer science professor and software entrepreneur named Michael McCool. In just one weekend, his company, RapidMind, in Waterloo, Ont., Canada, used the programming platform that McCool has been working on for nearly a decade to create a crowd simulation of 16 000 individual chickens. Imagine the biggest flock of virtual fowl ever assembled. Each chicken is controlled by a simple artificial intelligence program, operating according to a handful of rules. Each chicken wants to move toward the rooster but must avoid collisions with other chickens, fences, and the barn. To do so, each one must constantly check the position of its nearest neighbors and other objects in its environment and then decide how to move. If that doesn’t sound all that impressive to you, consider this: all 16 000 of those faux chickens are doing this maneuvering at the same time on a single Cell microprocessor. It is a chore that would tax a rack full of conventional servers. After viewing the virtual barnyard at the IBM booth during the game conference, one new fan gave the RapidMind team a rubber chicken. The company’s developers stashed the gag gift near an air-hockey table in the office rec room. Now, every time programmers hit a new performance benchmark, one of them grabs the chicken and squeezes until it emits an unholy scream. The masterminds at RapidMind thoroughly abused that poor bird as they prepared for last month’s release of the RapidMind Development Platform 2.0, the first software tool to help programmers write code for microprocessor chips like the Cell as well as for graphics processors from ATI Technologies, Nvidia Corp., and other companies. What the processors have in common is that they are all multicore chips—that is, each individual chip has several or even dozens of processing units, called “cores.” By the middle of this year, RapidMind plans to release version 3.0 of the platform, designed to support multicore CPUs from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. RapidMind’s timing couldn’t be better. While the Moore’s Law–decreed doubling of transistors goes on unabated every 18 months, AMD, IBM, Intel, and others have determined that all those transistors can’t switch on and off much faster than they already do. Clock speeds top out at around 4 gigahertz, beyond which a microprocessor starts getting hot enough to spontaneously combust. So instead of making smaller chips that run faster, the near-term strategy is to keep chips the same size but put more processor cores in them.
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