Open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to take full advantage of the latest spoils from the heated microprocessor battle between AMD and Intel.
The arrival of eight and 12-core x86 chips may make per socket software licensing seem like a good deal for Microsoft server software customers. Why? Because the new multicore technology promises to let them increase chip capacity while theoretically reducing the number of sockets.
Adding more processing cores is becoming the main way of boosting the performance of server and PC chips, but the benefits will be greatly diminished if the industry can't overcome certain hardware and programming challenges, said participants at the recent Multicore Expo in Santa Clara, California.
With the advent of multicore processors such as the Intel Core Duo, which is now commonplace in PCs, software developers must deal with a new wrinkle — getting software to be processed across multiple cores — in order to ensure the maximum performance from their software. But this is much easier said than done, with developers having to tackle issues with concurrency and potential performance bottlenecks. Already, 71% of organisations are developing multithreaded applications for multicore hardware, according to a recent IDC survey sponsored by tool vendor Coverity.