Before the era of multicore chips, performance gains in CPUs was achieved by a combination of ever increasing speed and architectural enhancements. This resulted in more and more power being consumed by the processor -- a situation that could not continue forever.

As I sit at my computer with it multicores considering the advantages of parallelism, faster computers, better performance, a strange feeling comes over me, 'Haven't I heard this before?'

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 (64-bits version) offer new NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) support. Therefore, it is very important for Windows developers to understand the differences found in the complex underlying multicore and manycore hardware. Coreinfo is a very simple yet powerful command-line utility that shows you very useful information about the processors, their organization and the cache topology.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 includes many interesting improvements related to its multicore programming features. The parallelism and concurrency profiling tools allow developers to visualize the behavior of a multithreaded application on multicore microprocessors and collect resource contention data.

Microsoft released the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 that comes with the new .Net Framework 4.0 Beta 2. The previous Beta 1 offered many interesting features that empowered parallel programming using the supported languages. However, the IDE had many important performance problems.

Of course we're a little jealous of those developers who get to develop those fun and nifty IPhone apps! Perhaps we're just a tad bit curious too. But for the moment we are absolutely in the grips of a very different kind of software development.

On one hand it's funny. On the other hand, well ... it's funny. It's probably a matter of poetic justice being served up. Something I did or something Tracey did in a past life. But recently we seem unable to escape conversations that end up in questions (which we normally evade) about what we do.

Earler this week I watched a webinar on Beyond “thinking” parallel:How to choose the right parallel programming model. The webinar was first of a series of webinars on Real World Parallelism that will be broadcast over the coming weeks. James Reinders took us through some pertinent questions about what we should expect of a parallel programming model, he then went on to give examples of how different current and emerging parallel technologies 'fit the bill'.

Over recent weeks Intel have been involved in some exiting developments that continue to strengthen contribution it is making to the world of parallel programming. Aquisition of Rapidmind and Cilk I'm sure will complement and enhance today's solutions that Intel offer. See Reinders on Rapidmind and Reinders on Cilk for more opinion on this.

Looking at my diary of events around multicore for the upcoming months, it seems clear to me that the world of Parallel Worlds is 'full speed ahead'.

Moblin v2.0 for Intel Atom Processor based netbooks is already available. Developers with Linux experience will find it easy to target this new attractive platform. However, many developers have many questions related to the multicore support offered this new operating system.

The interest on Rich Services Cloud Applications is growing fast. Users want responsive and immersive interactions from any locations. Nowadays, you cannot think about a business application without mobility in mind. However, you cannot avoid creating a rich user experience (UX) in mobile devices whilst accessing services on the cloud. If you want to offer a really nice experience, you'll have to use parallel programming skills everywhere.

There is no doubt that Intel Atom is an attractive microprocessor. Netbooks, embedded systems, consumer electronic devices, and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) are using its different flavors. But can multicore programming skills be useful with these single-core CPUs?

Solving an old mathematic problem seems a lot like picking at a scab. But then I'm not a mathematician. Still, it's hard not to be impressed when mathematicians solve a problem that's stumped other mathematicians for hundreds of years.