Dual-core Systems Necessary for Business Users?

Lam1969 writes "Hygeia CIO Rod Hamilton doubts that most business users really need dual-core processors: 'Though we are getting a couple to try out, the need to acquire this new technology for legitimate business purposes is grey at best. The lower power consumption which improves battery life is persuasive for regular travelers, but for the average user there seems no need to make the change. In fact, with the steady increase in browser based applications it might even be possible to argue that prevailing technology is excessive.' Alex Scoble disagrees: 'Multiple core systems are a boon for anyone who runs multiple processes simultaneously and/or have a lot of services, background processes and other apps running at once. Are they worth it at $1000? No, but when you have a choice to get a single core CPU at $250 or a slightly slower multi-core CPU for the same price, you are better off getting the multi-core system and that's where we are in the marketplace right now.' An old timer chimes in: 'I can still remember arguing with a sales person that the standard 20 Mg hardrive offered plenty of capacity and the 40 Mg option was only for people too lazy to clean up their systems now and then. The feeling of smug satisfaction lasted perhaps a week.'"

Comments

You've got more threads than you might think...

[gbulmash]

The key quote here, IMO, is: "Multiple core systems are a boon for anyone who runs multiple processes simultaneously and/or have a lot of services, background processes and other apps running at once."

All the anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-exploit, DRM, IM clients, mail clients, multimedia "helper" apps, browser "helper" apps, little system tray goodies, etc., etc., and so on, it can start to add up. A lot of home and small business users are running a lot more background and simultaneous stuff than they may realize.

That's not to say these noticeably slow down a 3.2GHz single-core machine with a gig of RAM, but the amount of stuff running in the backgrownd is growing exponentially. Dual core may not be of much benefit to business users now, but how long will that last?

- Greg

Re:You've got more threads than you might think...

[timeOday]

i ended up showing that i have almost 50 backround apps running,

Resident in memory, sure, but I doubt they were actually in the "run" state at that moment. Most of them were waiting for a timer to expire, or for a Windows message, a network packet, a keypress, etc.

The number of resident processes really doesn't matter. What does matter is to look at your CPU utilization when you're not actively doing anything. Even with all those "running" processes, it probably isn't over 5%. That's how much you'll benefit from a dual processor.

I don''t agree either.

[Saven Marek]

for the average user there seems no need to make the change. In fact, with the steady increase in browser based applications it might even be possible to argue that prevailing technology is excessive.'

I definitely don't agree. I remember hearing the same rubbish comments in various forms from shortsighted journos and analysts when we were approaching cpus with 50mhz. then I heard the same creeping up to 100mhz then 500mhz then 1ghz.

It is always the same. "The average user doesn't need to go up to the next $CURRENT_GREAT_CPU because they're able to do their average things OK now". Of course they're able to do their average things now, that's why they're stuck doing average things.

1996 Called

[wideBlueSkies]

It wants to know why we need pentiums on the desktop. Why isn't a 486 DX fast enough?

wbs.

Most folks DON'T need much HDD space...

[Loopy]

Really, consider the average business PC user. Outside of folks that have large development environments, do video/graphics/audio work, work on large software projects (such as games) really do not need 80GB hard disks. If you DO need more than that, you probably are quickly getting to the point of being able to justify storing your data on a file server. My unit at work only has 30GB on it, and that includes several ghost images of the systems I'm running QA on. Sure, grouse about Microsoft code bloat all you want but it doesn't take up THAT much HDD space.

Sweeping generalizations are rarely more than "Yeah, me too!" posts. /rolleyes

Re:Most folks DON'T need much HDD space...

[MyLongNickName]

Agreed. In fact, in any kind of multi-person office (or single for that matter), only PC software should be on the hard drive. No files. Anything of any importance should be saved to a network.

Whenever work has to be done on one of the office PCs, we do not give you the opportunity to transfer stuff off before we move it out. Lost a file? Go ahead, complain... you'll get written up for violating corporate policy.

Personal files? While discouraged, each user gets so much private space on the network.

Re:Most folks DON'T need much HDD space...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Agreed. In fact, in any kind of multi-person office (or single for that matter), only PC software should be on the hard drive. No files. Anything of any importance should be saved to a network.

That's nice. I've got about 2GB of automated tests I need to run before I make each release of new code/tests I write to source control. Running these from a local hard drive takes about 2 hours. Running them across the network takes about 10 hours, if one person is doing it at once. There are about 20 developers sharing the main development server that hosts source control etc. in my office. Tell me again how having files locally is wrong, and we should run everything over the network?

(Before you cite the reliability argument, you should know that our super-duper mega-redundant top-notch Dell server fell over last week, losing not one but two drives in the RAID array at once, and thus removing the hot-swapping recovery option and requiring the server to be taken down while the disk images were rebuilt. A third drive then failed during that, resulting in the total loss of the entire RAID array, and the need to replace the lot and restore everything from back-ups. Total down-time was about two days for the entire development group. (In case you're curious, they also upgraded some firmware in the RAID controller to fix some known issues that may have been responsible for part of this chaos. No, we don't believe three HDs all randomly failed within two days of each other, either.)

Fortunately, we were all working from local data, so most of us effectively had our own back-ups. However, this didn't much help since everything is tied to the Windows domain, so all the services we normally use for things like tracking bugs and source control were out anyway. We did actually lose data, since there hadn't been a successful back-up of the server the previous night due to the failures, so in effect we really lost three days of work time.

All in all, I think your "store everything on the network, or else" policy stinks of BOFHness, and your generalisation is wholly unfounded. But you carry on enforcing your corporate policy like the sysadmin overlord you apparently are, as long as you're happy for all your users to hold you accountable for it if it falls apart when another policy would have been more appropriate.

Unbelievable

[svunt]

I really can't believe this debate is ongoing. It's really the same thing, as has been pointed out above, as any "I don't need it this week, so it's just not important, period" argument, which can be traced back some decades now. For some of us, it's worth the early adopter price, for the rest, it's worth waiting until it's a much cheaper option, but as we all should know by now, what Gateway giveth, Gates taketh away. As the new hardware becomes available, software developers will take advantage of it. The only quetion is - how long can you hold out while the price comes down. It'll be a different answer for all of us. There is no definable "business user" to make such generalisations about accurately.

It's a flocking behaviour...

[tlambert]

It's a flocking behaviour... and you *must* take it into account when choosing software.

Q: "What function of Word that wasnt available in Word 6.0 and is now requires this insane increase of performance need?"

A: The ability to open and read documents sent to you by third parties using the newer tools.

For example, when your lawyer buys a new computer, and installs a new version of Office, and writes up a contract for you, you are not going to be able to read it using your machine running an older version of the application. And the newer version doesn't run on the older platform.

Don't worry - the first copy of a program that has this continuous upgrade path lock-in is free witht he machine.

-- Terry

Apple is pretty good at this

[Space cowboy]

If you look at the way most OSX apps are designed, it's easy to multi-thread them. Cocoa pretty much imposes a model/view/controller pattern, and when your model manipulation is separate from your UI, it's pretty simple to spawn a background thread to calculate long tasks, or adopt a divide & conquer approach.

The other nice thing they have is the Accelerate.framework - if you link against that, you automatically get the fastest possible approach to a lot of compute-intensive problems (irrespective of architecture), and they put effort into making them multi-CPU friendly.

Then there's xcode which automatically parallelises builds to the order of the number of CPUs you have. If you have more than one mac on your network, it'll use distcc to (seamlessly) distribute the compilation. I notice my new Mac Mini is significantly faster than my G5 at producing PPC code. Gcc is a cross-compiler, after all...

And, all the "base" libraries (Core Image, Core Video, Core Graphics etc.) are designed to be either (a) currently multi-cpu aware, or (b) upgradeable to being multi-cpu aware when development cycles become available.

You get a hell of a lot "for free" just by using the stuff they give away. This all came about because they had slower CPUs (G4's and G5's) but they had dual-proc systems. It made sense for them to write code that handled multi-cpu stuff well. I fully expect the competition to do the same now that dual-CPU is becoming mainstream in the intel world, as well as in the Apple one...

Simon

Re:Memory bound, not CPU bound ...

[swillden]

I'm a software developer [...] I'm almost never CPU bound if I have enough memory.

Don't compile much, huh? I'd love to have dual cores -- "make -j3", baby!

I want my CPU cycles back.

[woolio]

I think the main problem today is that many programmers still wet behind the ears, developing on the latest and greatest machine, combined with ineptitude/inexperience...

For example, they can write code that unnecesarily makes lots of copies of arrays (no lazy evaluation, using pass-by-value ), [unnecessarily] evaluate the same function/expression a huge number of times, badly misuse things like linked-lists, or even just use stupid implementations [bubblesort, etc]...

And they will never realize how slow these things are because they are trying small datasets for their testing/debugging. Routine "X" may seem fast because it executes in 20ms (practically instant), but perhaps a more skilled person could write it using lower-order complexity algorithms and it would only need 10ms... The disturbed reader may ask what's the point... Well, if you are on a computer that is 3X slower and using real-world input data that is 5X bigger, you WILL notice a huge difference in the two implementations!!!!

And if you are like most of the public, you will blame the slowness on your own computer being out-of-date ---- and you will go and buy a new one.

Plus, "time-to-market" pressures mean that companies probably tend toward releasing poorly designed & inefficient code, all in the name of the almighty buck. Fscking "Moore" created a self-fufilling prophesy that made things more cost efficient [for software development] to buy a better computer than to write a more efficient program.

When computers stop getting faster, software will start getting a whole lot better...