AMD Quad Cores, Oh My

Lullabye_Muse writes "From engadget we learn that AMD has plans for putting 4 cores on one die by the time Apple has fully gone to Intel processors. Full story here. They say they could eventually have up to 32 cores with scalable technology, but most programs haven't even got the ability to hyperthread, so do we really need the extra cores?"

Comments

Ah... history fails to be remembered again...

[fitten]

but most programs haven't even got the ability to hyperthread, so do we really need the extra cores?

Once upon a time, most programs didn't have the ability to do IEEE754 floating point either so did we really need the FPUs?

Once upon a time, most programs didn't have the ability to do 3D graphics at 30fps. Do we really need dedicated high performance graphics cards?

The list goes on... but no one learns...

Re:Ah... history fails to be remembered again...

[Tim C]

My first computer (a Sinclair ZX Spectrum) had 8KB of RAM. My first PC had 32MB.

My current graphics card has 256MB of RAM.

Even if none of my apps can take advantage of 4 cores, my PC can - I could be running a lengthy compile and transcoding some video while playing a game and still be contributing to SETI@home or something.

More to the point, you could have a long-running process (like video transcoding/encoding) running on one or two cores, with the remaining core(s) doing something else for you while you wait.

Doesn't have to be threads

[m50d]

Who still uses one application at a time, really? I know there's less benefit when it's different applications because of register sharing, but if it's cheaper to get 4 cores than 2 cpus it's probably worth it.

Re:Do we really need the extra cores?

[MillionthMonkey]

I once fixed some lady's machine where about 20 spyware processes were running. Now imagine she has 32 cores. I guess 640 spyware processes will be running on that thing by the time she calls anyone to fix it.

Re:Intel working on silicon laser to link cores

[wfberg]

Question: will Intel's possession of si-lasers shut AMD out?

No, because AMD and Intel crosslicense their patents. Under the same agreement Intel gets to use AMD's AMD64 instruction set and call it EM64T.

What does hyperthreading have to do with it?

[david.given]

most programs haven't even got the ability to hyperthread, so do we really need the extra cores?

This statement makes no sense. And, besides:

zcat foo.gz | bzip2 -c > foo.bz2

Look, ma! Code that will run twice as fast on a multiprocessor system!

Re:Hyperthreading

[grumpygrodyguy]

" What does a developer have to do to take advantage of this?"
Easy use threads.

Multi-threaded code is very difficult to write correctly and debug. It's hardly 'easy'.

Multi threading is not all that hard. And yes I have written code that uses threads.

When, for a school project? There are very few cases where integrating a multi-threaded handler into a progrom doesn't introduce a formidable degree of complexity. What really needs to take root is a new programming paradigm. One that assumes all procedures, functions and system calls are designated as concurrent from the get-go. People smarter than most of us need to design a language/compiler that doesn't burden the programmer with the responsibility of 'keeping track' of when to use threads and when not to.

Re:Don't count the processes

[fm6]

My guess is that most current spywear is not multithreaded due to universiality and size contraints, but as you state, we can soon look forward to better quality, bug free, multithreaded spyware soon.

First off, "good" spyware doesn't have to be multithreaded. It just has to be smart about yielding control, so it doesn't disable the process that it's infiltrated.

Second, most spyware is well written. Badly written spyware is ineffective -- by screwing up your system, it calls attention to itself, and encourages you to run a scan. Spyware and adware wouldn't have spread so thoroughly if it were all written by hacks.