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A 2nd Core to Keep Windows Chugging Along?
Eh-Wire writes "Almost every hardware junkie I know would give most anything to take a spin in the new dual core hot rods from Dell or one of the custom system builders. But what if you actually needed that second core to run your anti-virus, spyware detection software and firewall just to get a little gaming or Internet surfing done on the first core. Would that really be a good reason to bring home a shiny new machine? I can think of a couple of different things I could use a second core for but running an iron lung on it just to keep the machine chugging along just isn't one of them. Curiously enough, PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason."
More power just gives developers an excuse to use more resources. There is no reason a word processing program should lag on a 2+ ghz processor... but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does...
I am a linux fan, but I am not so blinded to know that over the last couple of years, Mac OS X has been the only operating system that has been getting consistently faster for general workstation usage. So I'd say if you really want extra performance that you can use, and won't get wasted by bloat, wait until a Macintosh is released with a dual-core processor.
Good god. More seriously, just seeing people put ideas like that out makes me cringe, not because it's not necessary but because it seems to me that thinking like that will only lead companies like Microsoft to dedicate the second core to nothing but fixing problems that shouldn't be there in the first place. I suppose it's inevitable, though. Programming, especially of the bad, lazy or bloated variety, always seems to expand to fill and tax whatever hardware is available to it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Seriously, what in the world is this article about?
Amazing revelation: dual core processors can do two things at the same time?! You must be kidding me. Any properly threaded application can take advantage of dual cores--there's no need to dream up scenarios where someone could be *gasp* doing multiple things at once.
I don't mean to sound harsh, but I'm confused as to why this is newsworthy.
I don't do PC's anymore outside of work where we have everyone clamped down pretty tight so I had kind of lost touch with how bad it really was out there. Last week I had one of my users bring in his PC that was locking up on him and doing the usual "strange stuff" that users talk about. I really never did get around to trying to fix anything though.
I sat in awe as the thing, with no programs open and nobody touching it spent most of the day fighting it's own little virus/spyware battle. Between Symantec and the (easily) half a dozen anti-spyware programs he had installed the computer sent a constant stream of pop-up windows coming at me warning me about assorted files and registry keys it thought suspicious and busily scanning it's ass off.
I wondered how he got any work done on the thing with it spending so much in the way of resources on "self defense". This is the answer in Windows world, they're going to eventually sell you a PC that's really two in one with the first one dedicated to just running the OS and all this crap you have to buy to keep from being bent over by the virus writers and the other virus writers who create spyware/adware.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
If you want to use Wordperfect 5.1, go for it. But I like a word processor to do a little more for me now a days, and that includes all the nifty things OpenOffice and Microsoft Office can do for me.
Maybe you don't write system documentation or work with complicated spreadsheets, but I do, and I welcome the feature rich applications available today.
Stop spreading your FUD. You don't need a 2Ghz machine to run a word processor. A 350Mhz Pentium II will run Open/Microsoft Office just fine, assuming you have enough memory.
But since we HAVE 2Ghz+ machines, everything runs faster. I mean, hey, you don't NEED a car that can go above 65MPH, but it's sure nice to have one huh?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Actually, I think the PC mag article hits the nail right on the head. The point of of a dual core machine is to run simulanious processes that need to execute side by side.
Now, we all know that most of our processes are input bound, not compute bound. They spend the vast majority of their time waiting for user input. Game are an exception: they both continually process changing data and wait for user input (that's why they are such good benchmarks). Most everything else, however, is input bound. However, many of the processes that run in the background are compute bound, input has little effect on them.
Now in my mind the best way to use a second core is to a) lump all your input bound processes on one core, and your background compute bound processes on the other (like anti-virus, firewall, maybe music, etc.) or b) run compute bound processes on each at the same time (game on one, factor large prime numbers on the other). Either way, there is almost no point in placing seperating the input bound processes between the two cores. This means that unless you are clever about how you divide the work, you aren't going to get much out of it.
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
hint: web sites should not need instructions.
A lot of the systems folks that I've been hearing from and things that I've been reading have suggested that, like it or not, multi-core systems are the way of the future. The argument is that the clock-speed aspect of Moore's law has been slowing down for the past couple of years and that we've seen single processors that are as fast as they'll go with current chip design and fabrication technology. (Barring fundamental breakthroughs, of course.) Hence parallelism and multi-core systems.
I think the point is that it's not really a choice between clock speed and parallelism. You may still have a choice at the moment, but don't expect that to continue. Developers will have to start learning to deal with parallelism if they don't want to fall off the performance curve. I expect we'll start seeing methods, tools, languages and libraries to help developers manage it easily while avoid the common dangers of deadlock and inconsistency. There's some interesting research in the area and we may start seeing some of that find its way into production systems. And of course once developers start adopting parallelism, consumers will in turn begin to see the benefits of it.
In some ways its an obvious message if you look at supercomputers. No one's running serial code on petahertz machines! They're all just systems with large numbers of fairly pedestrian processors with custom fast, low-latency interconnects. As always, this is just the natural trickling down of that to the desktop level.
>> Or get a router
You can buy a router, and it is a really good idea, but most users will still click "yes" on whatever dialogue pops up on the screen. Your average user doesn't know what a "binary" is...
It might I think if you did devote a second core purely to spyware/virus/babysitting it would only reduce the problem but not remove it.
smarter PC usage is the answer, not more hardware...
http://request-header.info
He probably has 25+ pieces of unnessesary crap running at startup.
Why does every coder that writes a Windows app think it has to run at sartup?
The only things that should ever run at startup, in the background, are: AV, mobo, video, sound, and anti spyware. Anything else is a waste of resources.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I can't believe people waste their harddrive space and clock cycles on shit like virus protection.
Yes, because it's that much better to waste it to run spyware and viruses instead.
Not True, get with the times.
... Oracle is an example.
... one socket, but takes full use of hyperthreading .. a second virtual CPU, and will do the same with two cores in one socket.
... 2 dual core processors.
Microsoft said 6 months or so ago that one socket = one CPU. Other software vendors that license based on CPU did the same
XP Home will take one physical CPU
Similarly, XP Pro will make full use of two sockets
Loose some of your hate for windows, and you might just get to take advantage of all this tasty new technology.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
What the PC Mag writer neglected -- or was oblivous to -- is the fact that those other processes occupying the second (or hereafter known as "wasted") core use a hell of a lot of I/O. A virus scanner scans everything going into the secondary storage. Sure, you have effectively two processors, but that doesn't do you any good if one of those processes is constantly scanning stuff on the hard drive. You're not going to be able to run Norton and Half-Life at the same time, no matter how fast the processor.
The point is that you shouldn't have to have all of those I/O bandwidth-hogging "crutches" (such as virus scanners, spyware scanners and the like) stealing your machine's I/O bandwidth. The title of this article has it right: you already do need a more powerful machine just to keep Windows "chugging" along.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
"Yes, it's "buried", but it's buried in a logical place if you're familiar with Office products."
I think it's also worth mentioning that one DOES need to learn to use software. It's really strange that people think the computer should know exactly what they need, display it on the screen, and nothing else.
And when they want to change something, they shouldn't need to learn to do it.
What happened there? Everything in life takes some learning, and software is certainly no exception.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
As far as I can tell, it's a problem that was created from both sides. Users are always lazy (for anything and everything -- for instance, if you didn't have to pass a test to get a driver's license, nobody would ever take driving lessons and learn how to drive properly), but the industry is just as much to blame for humoring such beliefs. For example, this menu-hiding functionality was spawned directly from the belief that, "The user shouldn't need to learn how to use the software." Menu items that a user never uses, or uses rarely, will get hidden in an attempt to simplify the interface (hide functionality from users that don't use that functionality). Of course, it then pisses off the user the one or two times they do need to use that hidden functionality. I wonder how often this causes a user to believe that the software can't do what they want (when it really can, but the option is hidden), so they switch to a different application? Probably not a big problem with Word or Excel, but if TurboTax hid the option to itemize how many people do you think would switch over to TaxCut? (obligatory tax-related example, given the time of year)
In my opinion, this mind set needs to change. If you don't know how to work on your car, and you don't want to learn, then you go pay a mechanic to do it for you. The same thing should apply to softare. If you don't know how to user Word and you don't want to learn, you should be able to pay someone to do what you need. If you're too cheap to pay, then you'd better be willing to learn.
On a related topic, we geeks need to stop doing free tech support for friends and family simply because we're the people they know who "know computers". If you must help your friends and family with their computer problems, charge them money. Even better, you should refuse to help unless they've exhausted all their options. Otherwise, they'll never learn and just keep coming back every time they get a popup window they don't understand. It's the age old, "Teach a man to fish," problem.
Running a virus checker slows down your computer because of the amount of disk accesses, not because it's using up your computer's CPU power. Adding an extra core isn't going to help.