Microsoft claims multi-core processors too hard for software developers

I saw this article this morning and shook my head is disbelief. Herb Sutter, a software architect at Microsoft, opened the Fall Processor Forum complaining that multi-core processors were making PC software development too difficult. Specific comments included:

Developers who have been creating applications for servers have already cleared this hurdle, since multi-core processors and multiple-processor systems have been common in the server market for several years, Sutter said. Many of these applications have been designed with multiple software threads that can take advantage of the parallelism of these systems, he said. Client application developers, however, have been stuck in a single-threaded world, creating what Sutter called "sequential applications" for many years.

Really? I led a group of software developers in the 1980s who were building parallel applications then for systems with hundreds of processors. Similar highly parallel efforts have been available in the commercial marketplace for years in software packages such as Adobe Photoshop and Premiere, Alias Wavefront's Maya, Oracle's database systems, Apple's Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Shake, and a variety of others. True, these aren't your typical Microsoft Visual Basic development shops, but they are commercial developers who saw multiprocessor machines coming, even on the Intel platform.

Given that Intel-based multicore Mac OS X systems may be here as soon as next spring, Microsoft might want to speed up work on its Concur multi-threading system. Because you can bet that there will be Apple and Adobe multicore-capable applications running on those platforms on day one of their launch (after all, Apple had their developers designing for multiprocessor clients years ago). And if applications developed on Microsoft's platforms continue to be stuck in single-threaded thinking, users will have even more incentive to switch away from Windows next year than security and sexy design.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Multi-threading, Apple, Windows, Software Development, Marketing