Multi-core processors offer tremendous performance gains, but few applications take full advantage of this new technology because of the significant complexity of parallelizing across the multiple cores.
Applications that are not multi-core enabled will suffer a performance decrease as it will only run on a single core, and will not scale as the number of cores increases.
While efforts to multi-thread an application may take advantage of multiple cores, these projects are ambitious, time-consuming and error-prone. Multi-threaded applications are harder to develop and test, which requires a level of development expertise which is difficult to find. Software organizations are all too aware of the real fear of releasing an unstable solution that quickly fails in the field.
Traditional approaches force software organizations to choose between either decreased performance or longer, more expensive development cycles. In most cases, these organizations are limiting themselves to single-core processing and leaving incredible business benefits on the table.
Multi-core processing presents an opportunity for software organizations to gain a competitive advantage. The award-winning RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform simplifies the development of parallel applications, reducing the cost and timelines of software development when compared to multi-threaded projects, and greatly improves the likelihood of project success.
Processors Supported By RapidMind:
AMD,Intel Multi-core x86 CPUs
NVIDIA GeForce® 6000, 7000 or 8000 series cards
AMD® FireStream™ 9170
ATI™ x1X00, 2x00 and HD Radeon™ 3870 families of cards
IBM® QS21/22 Blade server with Cell BE processor
Cell BE on Sony PlayStation®3 using Yellow Dog™ Linux
For more information http://www.rapidmind.com
