Small firms keen to adopt multi-core technologies

Change is as big a necessity for the small and medium software companies as it is for the larger players. This was the message from the Intel's seminar on multi-core parallelism here on Thursday.

With multi-core processors expected to replace the single core chip in computers and mobile devices completely by the year 2010, the second-level software companies are finding it an opportunity to move to the multi-core processor environment.

"Larger companies are anyway adopting the new processor technologies. What is interesting is the kind of response we are getting from the small and medium companies," said Narendra Bhandari, director, Asia Pacific region, Solutions Engineering Group at Intel Technology India Private Limited.

Around 400-odd mid and small scale software developers attended the session.

According to him, it is an opportunity for the smaller players to push their products since the enterprise customers as well as individual users are fast switching to multi-core embedded hardware platforms.

Once used to conducting such events only at Bangalore, the software hub of India, to update developers on the processor technologies of immediate future, Intel India now chose Hyderabad as the launch pad for this year's programme. The company plans to hold such sessions in other cities including Pune, Chennai, and Gurgaon during the year.

The company aims to reach out to close to 10,000 software developers covering 200 organisation in the country this year with the offer of software products that convert the single stream software applications to multi-stream. This means, these software applications would be giving instructions to multiple cores in a computer processor parallely.

Multi-cores enable high speeds and high energy efficiency. They also enable the servers and computers to occupy less space.

"Visits to our website and downloads of software products that help introduce multi-core functionality into software applications have quadrupled from India in the last six months," Phil De La Zerda, director - worldwide sales and business development of Intel Corporation, said during a media interaction.

Intel sold over one million multi-core processors by the second quarter of 2006-07 and according to Phil, the sales were largely driven by mobile computers and other mobile devices such as cellphones.