Getting the Least of our your C Compiler – The Best Article I have ever written?

Back in 2001, while a PhD student at Uppsala University and IAR Systems, I wrote what has to be the most popular and long-lived article I ever did: “Getting the Least out of Your C Compiler“. It was an Embedded Systems Conference class that I also presented in 2002 (after that, I changed jobs to Virtutech and therefore C programming was no longer my official topic). However, the text has lived on. It was featured as a chapter in  the “Firmware Handbook” edited by Jack Ganssle, translated into German by IAR Germany, and has popped up in various places from time to time.

Last week, it resurfaced at Embedded.com, with an attribution that was initially wrong.

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“Nulticore Effect”

Jack Ganssle wrote a column about the failure of multicore to scale, based on an article in IEEE Spectrum. He makes the following claim:

Now a study in IEEE Spectrum shows that even for the classic embarrassingly parallel problems like weather simulations multicore offers little benefit. The curve in that article is priceless. As the number of cores grow from two to 64 performance plummets by a factor of five. Additional processors nullify each other.

Call it the Nulticore Effect.

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