Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

SW Weenies: Ready for CMT?

Posted by Hemos on from the step-on-up dept.

tbray writes "The hardware guys are getting ready to toss this big hairy package over the wall: CMT (Chip Multi Threading) and TLP (Thread Level Parallelism). Think about a chip that isn't that fast but runs 32 threads in hardware. This year, more threads next year. How do you make your code run fast? Anyhow, I was just at a high-level Sun meeting about this stuff, and we don't know the answers, but I pulled together some of the questions."

2 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Steam Engine - Diesel by kpp_kpp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Some people have predicted this move for quite some time. I remember hearing about it back in the late 80's early 90's and I'm sure it goes way back before then. The analogy was to Steam Engines and why they lost out over Diesels. You can only make a Steam engine so big but you cannot connect them together to get more power. With diesels you can hook many of them together for more power. Chips are finally getting to the same point -- It is more cost efficient to chain them together than to create a monsterous one. I'm surprised it has take this long to get to this point.

  2. Re:Question: What needs multiple threads? by Frit+Mock · · Score: 5, Insightful


    In games the AI of non-player-characters (-objects) can profit a lot from threading.

    But for common apps ... I don't expect a big gain from multiple threads. I guess typical apps like browsers, word-processor and so one have a hard time utilizing more than 3-4 threads for the most common operations a user does.