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Are three cores better than two?
Barbarian writes "That's the question that Tom's Hardware asked. They took a dual-cpu motherboard and stuck both a single and a dual core Opteron on the board, for a total of three cores. Does it work? Well, yes, when it's not crashing. It does raise the possibility of tri-core processors whilst we are waiting for the next die shrink."
If only you would lift the power supply 3 feet above the ground,.. Oh wait..
"Xbox 360 is a triple core, which is a pretty good indicator that this configuration is viable"
Wasn't XBox crashing constantly?
[sig]
No, no, no... Tomorrow there will be at least one duplicate post that 3 > 2. Then we will move back to 2 > 1, finally arriving at 4 > 3 sometime next week.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
The question can't be answered.
In some markets, hardware is released and only then does software take advantage of it. Sometimes software never takes advantage of the new hardware because of the complexity in writing code. I remember all the MMX and the like promotions, but I never really saw any evidence that it did anything.
In other markets, software is released and the hardware follows. I recall Quake (or was it Quake 2) and the rush months later to have a Voodoo SLI to boost framerates.
I am sure a 3-core processor could be "better" but only if the software to support it can be easily ported from the single core or dual core versions. Will software eventually be core-transparent because of a "xCore" abstraction layer? Will software be optimized properly for the ability to take advantage of the added cores?
I see the need for multitasking the processor side, but I also see the complexity in trying to differentiate all the different configurations a workstation may have. The more cores that are released, the more I see application-specific turn key solutions over "one version fits all." I also see the added costs in testing and developing, and who really knows if those costs lead to any savings by creating the additional cores.
That's the point of this post -- just because something increases efficiency in one sphere doesn't mean that there is an overall savings. There is no way to properly judge if the market will see a savings overall, and if it costs much more to produce/support/service the new product, it will fail. Nothing can stop that, not even great marketing.
I'm sure using anything other than a power of two irritates the binary gods, at least use an even number.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Why would anyone even want to do this? Most dual proc systems are designed so that the CPUs must be the same for them to work properly. Sure, this configuration is a bit cheaper than using two dual core procs, but unless you have a space CPU sitting around I really don't see the point.
Hehe, reminds me of The Onions article about five razor blades vs four.. Interesting that they wrotes this WELL before a 5-blade razor ever came out
Most game software is multithreaded. However, it is not multi-threaded in a way that will significantly increase performance given multiple cpus.
As one example, I worked on Diablo II, and it had at least 5 threads (there might have been even more, but I can remember what 5 threads did). I've talked to plenty of other people in the industry, and the story is the same everywhere: multithreaded, but not parallelized in the most cpu intensive areas.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Lots of kids and grandmas are getting their hands on multi-core consoles within the next year (XBox 360 = 3 processors, PS3 = 8 processors, Nintendo Revolution = 2 processors maybe). So game authors are going to be figuring the 3+ core game out soon, and Microsoft and Sony are betting money on that fact.
Well, yes, the crashing is a problem, so lets just agree that 3 Coors are better than two unless you're driving.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
...on Tom's multi-page reviews.
I hate sites where the article occupies less than 10% of the screen area.
Classical parallel programming tends to work well on powers of 2. One of the models for (big) parallel systems has the CPUs arranged in a hypercube structure, which works quite well for getting data to and from the processors. There are probably also advantages when it comes to laying out the cores on silicon.
For multitasking, there's really no need for a power of two, except to make the best use of bus lines (three bits to identify the CPU? Better to allow eight of them than four). Expecting two completely different processors to work well on a board designed for two identical ones is daft, though, and it's pretty obvious that the stability problems are due to this and not any inherent problem with having three cores.