CNET News reports that a new specification from AMD could make it easier for software developers to take advantage of processors with multiple cores.

"It seems only fair that since the hardware side of the computing world plowed ahead with parallelized computing, they should help out the software development community. In that spirit, AMD plans to let developers take a crack at its Light-Weight Profiler Tuesday as a possible assist for the growing problem faced by PC software developers: just how the hell are we going to effectively use processors with multiple cores? AMD's LWP could let applications written for runtime environments like Java or .Net interact directly with hardware to know how much performance is available across a series of cores, said Earl Stahl, vice president of software alliances for AMD."

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