by Larry Dignan
October 15th, 2008 @ 2:00 pm


While multicore chips hold great promise for applications and computing power they could wreak havoc on technology departments. That’s the message from Gartner analyst Carl Claunch, who argued Thursday that IT types should fear–yes fear–multicore technology.

Multicore chips carry multiple brains on them and companies like Intel are pushing a core arms raise. The more cores the better–even though applications providers haven’t quite caught up yet. Why will multicore be an issue? For starters multicore technology can be a budget buster. Among Claunch’s multicore points at Gartner’s Symposium ITxpo:

* You’ll need new coding skills in house;
* You’ll need new development tools;
* There are multiple core designs that will affect your software;
* Your existing software licensing deals become more complicated;
* And the impact on applications varies immensely.

All those wild cards and it’s not even clear whether your old programs–and you know you have dozens of legacy apps lying around–won’t run faster.