A recent announcement from Intel had, at face value, absolutely no interest at all for anyone concerned with enterprise IT infrastructures – unless, of course, they were also totally committed PC gamers as well. The company was announcing the Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform, previously codenamed (for reasons probably best left unasked) `Skulltrail’. This is two quad-core processors mounted together in a single package, making an eight-core (oct-core?) processing unit. 

This, apparently, will be the bees knees for gaming on a PC, and is the latest, higher performing implementation of the dual quad-core approach the company first showed at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show. But for those interested in infrastructure, the announcement has some other connotations, for it should sound familiar. For any of them that use x86-based servers – and that will certainly mean most of them – there should be the memory of the announcement from Intel, this time last year, of Clovertown. This was a `quad-core’ processor made up of two dual-core devices in a single package, targeted that time at the server vendors. It was followed, later in the year, by the next step along the roadmap, a single chip quad-core device. 

One swallow may not make a summer, but two may indicate a strong hint of it and a repeat by Intel of this development tactic, putting two existing multicore processors together in a package, does suggest the blindingly obvious. This is that later this year a single chip eight-core x-86 device can be expected. That, in turn, will be followed by a dual eight-core and the subsequent 16-core processor, probably during the second half of 2009. 

Following the pattern onwards now becomes easy: the number of cores per chip will double every year, which means that 1024-core processors will be here by 2015.  

Now throw into the pot Intel’s Multicore Enhanced Layer System, a technology it has developed for stacking multicore processors on top of each other. The quad-core devices are designed with connector pads for this purpose, so unless it proves to be ineffective in practice, we can expect to see it exploited with some relish. Its potential advantage, particularly for server vendors, is that it allows up to four chips to be stacked in a single package, and certainly more in future. 

So with a quad-core chip, systems designers can have eight, 12 or 16-core processor sub-systems. OK, they won’t be cheap, but they won’t be overly difficult to engineer or manufacture – so the price will not be beyond the pale. Now extrapolate the use of this technology with more cores per chip. Many server vendors may well be tempted to have the latest single chip multicore packaged up like this in order to get a temporary performance advantage in the marketplace. 

To return to a well-worn subject, however, server vendors, ISVs and users must first face up to the question of how they get over, round or through the wall that is now facing them. None of this hardware technology will be of any real value to anyone unless they can move the applications they now use to the new environments in ways that properly exploit parallelism, or find new applications that can. 

One thing is certain; most of the applications currently in use will not be suitable.