The thorniest problem of the computer industry will be addressed by Professor David May, architect of the Inmos Transputer, Professor of Computer Science at Bristol University and co-founder and CTO of XMOS Semiconductor.

May will argue that it is easy to use multi-core architectures to realise a wide range of applications during a presentation at the 4th annual Programmable Hardware Systems event to be held at The IET, Savoy Place, London, 8-9th October.

"Multicore design just isn't as complicated or difficult as most people make it out to be", says May, "by starting with a powerful but simple architecture, and coupling it with intuitive design tools, the great potential of multi-core devices can be quickly exploited."

Recently, the CEO of FPGA company Altera told Electronics Weekly that programming multi-cores is impossible.

"The challenge is how to programme it", says Daane, "it's the same challenge as Intel has in programming multi-core. The world doesn't know how to do it. There's no software that can divide tasks between cores. The multi-processor approach is limited by the software programmers who can't take advantage of more than one processor core."

Alan Gatherer at Texas Instruments is similarly sceptical: "I'm not sure anyone knows how to build a generic multi-core architecture. It's a great goal, but the chances of failure are 100 per cent."

Although the computer industry has no problem programming multi-core architectures when they are being used for specific applications, it has not found a way to use multi-core for general purpose applications.

This is because tasks can be allotted to cores in specific applications but, to be efficient in general purpose applications, there has to be some method of allocating tasks between cores on the fly, or distributing one task between several cores.

See also: Mannerisms, the blog of David Manners. Updated twice daily, it's the distinctive, entertaining, authoritative and never dull commentary on the semiconductor industry, from someone who knows. Sign up for the Mannerisms eNewsletter.

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