RPCV Richard Wirt plies his trade as a software expert at a company known more for its hardware design savvy and multi-billion dollar fabrication facilities



"My organization, the Software and Solutions Groups, employs 2,500 software-focused employees, many of whom are Ph.D.-level engineers. We tune operating systems, including Linux and Microsoft Windows*, optimize .NET* and Java* managed runtime environments and communicate software-related concerns from independent software vendors and software developers at companies such as Goldman Sachs to the rest of Intel."

RPCV Richard Wirt plies his trade as a software expert at a company known more for its hardware design savvy and multi-billion dollar fabrication facilities

Software Technology Trends and Futures with Goldman Sachs Developers

Introduction
By Geoff Koch

[Excerpt]

What happens when Intel's top software developer visits Wall Street? The Intel Software Network excerpted highlights from Wirt's remarks to find out.

Intel’s Dr. Richard Wirt plies his trade as a software expert at a company known more for its hardware design savvy and multi-billion dollar fabrication facilities. An Intel Senior Fellow, corporate vice president and general manager of the Software and Solutions Group, Wirt’s job is making sure that the world’s software takes full benefit Intel’s newest platform features and technologies, including multi-core architecture. As an Intel Senior Fellow, he is also considered a top technical achiever within the company.

Most know Intel as the planet’s largest chipmaker whose silicon devices are plunked into servers, desktop PCs, laptops, handheld devices and networking gear. But the soft spoken Wirt, a University of Oklahoma mathematics Ph.D. who served in the Peace Corps in the sixties and taught math in the South Pacific Islands, seems to enjoy dropping startling snippets about the company’s software expertise.

“Bill Gates likes to beat us up about why we have a bigger compiler team than he does,” Wirt told a worldwide group of Goldman Sachs developers and technologists in a presentation earlier this year.

The 90-minute lecture and Q&A session covered the transition to 64-bit computing and multi-core processors, the lineup of Intel’s software development tools and the move to parallelism through threading and clustering. It also brought one of Intel’s leading technologists face to face with the tech team at one of the world’s leading investment banking, securities and investment management firms.

What happens when Intel’s top software developer visits Wall Street? The Intel Software Network excerpted highlights from Wirt’s remarks to find out.

How many software programmers work at Intel?
Around 10,000, though many of those work on Intel-specific projects such as running CAD machines or supporting all of our e-business customer initiatives. My organization, the Software and Solutions Groups, employs 2,500 software-focused employees, many of whom are Ph.D.-level engineers. We tune operating systems, including Linux and Microsoft Windows*, optimize .NET* and Java* managed runtime environments and communicate software-related concerns from independent software vendors and software developers at companies such as Goldman Sachs to the rest of Intel. We have programmers writing code at five or six sites around the world, while doing nightly builds and subjecting all of our software to a common testing regime. So we deal with many of the same integration and complexity issues as do many of the larger ISVs and corporate programming shops.

What’s happening in 64-bit computing at Intel?
In short, 64-bit computing is coming into all of our processors – top to bottom. It started with the Intel® Itanium® processor and Intel Itanium 2 processor for backend, mainframe computing environments. Itanium 2 -based servers continue to deliver world class performance. For example, NASA’s Columbia supercomputing system, composed of 20 interconnected SGI Altix* 512 Itanium 2-based systems, was recently ranked* the third most powerful supercomputer on the planet. We’re continuing to extend 64-bit computing across Intel desktop PC, server and workstation products.
Editor’s note: As of June 27, with the introduction of the Intel® Celeron® D processor 351, Intel now has Intel® Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel® EM64T), or 64-bit memory addressability, available throughout its entire desktop and server processor lines.

Newer versions of Microsoft and Linux* operating systems are running 64-bit kernels. In these systems, it’s possible to vary between 32- and 64-bits on a per-process basis. Why Intel didn’t chose to port this model to its 64-bit chips?
Because of the complexity. To mix 32- and 64-bit processes, you often have to build a lot of custom scaffolding into an application stack. Interrupts are common, too, which cause problems by dumping 32-bit processes into the 64-bit kernel. Instead, with Intel EM64T , we chose simply to think a 32-bit process as it goes into the kernel. This stretches the parameters from 32- to 64-bits going into the kernel. The parameters are truncated back to 32-bits on their way out. The WOW subsystem (described in this MSDN*) handles this stretching and truncating behind the scenes, thus making it easier for developers.

How is Intel helping developers transition to 64-bit computing?
By investing significantly in tools. We offer software development products for C, C++ and FORTRAN developers working on 64-bit projects. Our tools support Windows and Linux and span architectures, from the Itanium processor family, to all of our 32-bit chips utilizing Intel EM64T down through the Intel XScale® Technology, which powers PDAs and smart phones. Our tools make it easier to move between environments and across architectures.

What’s more significant for developers – the move to 64-bit computing or to multi-core architecture?
The move to multi-core. Moving to 64-bits just entails cleaning up your code and then recompiling. But to take advantage of multi-core architectures, you have to make some decisions about threading.

[Excerpt]

Are you worried about the end of Moore’s Law?
No. We’ll be able to decrease feature size on our chips for at least 15 years. Design and fabrication changes, such as moving from 2D to 3D transistors, may extend things beyond that. Even when we reach hard and fast physical limits we’ll still be able to deliver the benefits of Moore’s Law – more computing power at a lower price – by increasing the number of processing cores on our CPUs. These benefits will continue to ship from our factories for the duration of my career at Intel. This also goes for the careers of most of the people who today work for me in the Software and Solutions Group, including those fresh out of college.

Intel Senior Fellow Richard Wirt is vice president and general manager of Intel’s Software and Solutions Group.

When this story was posted in July 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:




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