BANGALORE, INDIA: The power of computers is on a constant and upward move from dual core to quad core to multi-core and many-core (more than 32 cores) processors, said Prof Anant Agarwal, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT on the second day of the EmTech India 2010 Conference here.

Agarwal, who is also the founder of Tilera, delved into the future of computing – multi-core, many-core and Clouds.

“Today there is a big shift in the computing world, which is moving from multi-core processors to many-core processors. This happens understandably due to the Moore’s gap that refers to the gap between the expected performance and real performance of the processors. This gap in performance prompted to innovate multi-core processors,” he said.
 
Mulit-core processors help achieving balanced resources, lower frequency and capacity of many workers which is generally known as Chandraskasan effect. Actually people are moving towards multi-core processors. The shift in processing power has happened from dual core to quad core to multi-core and many-core (more than 32 cores) processors as the industry requirement for more computing capacity keeps increasing. 

Number of cores doubles every 18 months, and by 2015, the industry will be witnessing 1000-core processor, but the big question is – whether we are ready to accept this kind of super power computing technology?
 
The industry will also witness a tremendous growth of cloud computing. Parallel computing is no longer the privilege of rocket scientists; now it’s becoming mainstream. If IT departments, system and application companies do not go for parallel computing, they will perish. It gives a great business opportunity for IT companies.
 
“The industry should gear up to face three fundamental challenges including the scalability issues when it scales up to the next level of compute processing,” Agarwal added. 
 
The second day of the conference started with the welcome note of Jason Pontin, Editor-in-Chief, Technology Review, MIT.

He said, “The day-1 of the conference was really informative for the audiences and they enjoyed the sessions throughout the day.  What was striking on the first day was quality of ideas that formed the basis of the presentations yesterday. Many Indians presented their ideas that were truly innovative to the core.”