In the article Ballmer: Microsoft must be ‘multi-core’ Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said that his company must be able to operate successfully in multiple markets — a phenomenon he calls being “multi-core” — for the company to continue to grow well into the future.
Wait. This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with running an operating system on a the new multicore platforms from Intel and AMD. Ah, well. This is Microsoft talking after all.

There should be lots of multicore info coming out in the press with the Intel’s upcoming announcements this week. Wired magazine had an Intel Dual-Core FAQ that covers many of the issues. Most interesting: the new Intel dual core devices use 40% less power and run 40% faster than existing single-core Pentiums. Reviewers are calling it “the fastest chip they have ever seen”.

A good article in the EE Times about software development for multicore SoC. Thanks to Grayson Abbott of SigmaTel in Austin for the pointer to this article.

Dataquest to EDA: ‘It’s the software, stupid’

An article in Information Week titled ‘Now It’s A Quad-Core War’ this week discusses the accelerated race to quad core chips between Intel and AMD.

EE Times describes a collaboration between async logic experts Silistix and CPU core vendor Tenslilca:

Silistix, Tensilica team on multicore demo IC

Hard Cores: Multicore chips provide power but make app development tough

Re-engineering programs to work on multicore chips is already difficult but will get even harder as the number of processors continues to multiply.

July 10, 2006 (Computerworld) — Putting two or more processor cores on a single silicon chip has been one of the most important milestones in computing in recent years. It allows users to continue to reap the benefits of Moore’s Law while sidestepping the extreme difficulty of manufacturing, powering and cooling single microprocessors beyond 4 GHz. Chip multiprocessors (CMP) also offer the opportunity to significantly boost the performance of applications that are able to share them. …