If Apple’s Grand Central really is a major advance, that will be a big deal for the computer industry. As it stands, Moore’s Law is kinda broken except for apps that have been painfully hand coded for parallel processors.
In describing the next version of the Mac OS X operating system, dubbed Snow Leopard, Mr. Jobs said Apple would focus principally on technology for the next generation of the industry’s increasingly parallel computer processors.
Today the personal computer industry is going through a wrenching change in trying to find a way to keep up with the speed increases that were the hallmark of the PC business until about five years ago. At that point, companies like Intel, I.B.M. and AMD had simply lived off their continual ability to increase the clock speeds of their microprocessors. But the industry hit a wall as chips reached the melting point.
As a consequence, the industry shifted gears and began making lower-power processors that added multiple C.P.U.’s. The idea was to gain speed by breaking up problems into multiple pieces and computing the parts simultaneously.
The problem is that, having headed down that path, the industry is now admitting that it doesn’t know how to program the new parallel chips efficiently when the number of cores goes above a handful.
On Monday, Mr. Jobs claimed that Apple is coming to the rescue.
“We’ve added over a thousand features to Mac OS X in the last five years,” he said Monday in an interview after his presentation. “We’re going to hit the pause button on new features.”
Instead, the company is going to focus on what he called “foundational features” that will be the basis for a future version of the operating system.
“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”
Apple, he claimed, has made a parallel-programming breakthrough.
The other innovation Jobs mentioned is OpenCL (Open Computing Language) which is claimed to make it easy to exploit the parallel processing potential of the GPU (graphics processor). This has already become a poor-man’s path to a supercomputer, but again based on hand coding. If Apple makes this easy that is another Very Big Deal.
As NYT John Markoff closed his report
If Apple can use similar chips to power its future computers, it will change the computer industry.
Grand Central… no wikipedia article yet. Will we have to wait a year?