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Intel - Market Doesn't Need Eight Cores
PeterK writes "TG Daily has posted an interesting interview with Intel's top mobility executive David Perlmutter. While he sideswipes AMD very carefully ('I am not underestimating the competition, but..'), he shares some details about the successor of Core, which goes by the name 'Nehalem.' Especially interesting are his remarks about power consumption, which he believes will 'dramatically' decrease in the next years as well as the number of cores in processors: Two are enough for now, four will be mainstream in three years and eight is something the desktop market does not need." From the article: "Core scales and it will be scaling to the level we expect it to. That also applies to the upcoming generations - they all will come with the right scaling factors. But, of course, I would be lying if I said that it scales from here to eternity. In general, I believe that we will be able to do very well against what AMD will be able to do. I want everybody to go from a frequency world to a number-of-cores-world. But especially in the client space, we have to be very careful with overloading the market with a number of cores and see what is useful."
I don't doubt an "8 core" desktop will exist in the near future. Then again he has a point... we won't likely need it.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
If you put 8 core procs in desktop machines, software will be written that will take advantage of them. Which means you'll sell more 8 core procs.
Are you going to lead or follow?
"Our multiprocessor technology doesn't scale, but we don't want to scare investors away, so we'll pretend it doesn't matter."
I think he was talking about the foreseeable future.
1 core is really enough for most users. 2 cores is enough for most power users. 4 cores will be enough for all but the most demanding jobs. Workstations are different, however and are not usually considered part of the "desktop". For example, I could see 3D artists using 4 or 8 cores easily. In fact, there's simply no such thing as a computer that's "too fast" for certain purposes.
The issue, though, is one of moderation. Why would a desktop user want 8 cores, which are drawing insane amounts of power, when they're not even utilizing 4 to full advantage? Word processing, accounting, and surfing the web don't need any of this. Games? I can imagine in 10+ years we'll have some photo-realistic 3D games that run in real-time, but the vast majority of the work will likely be handled by GPU's and won't need 8 cores to deal with it.
I simply cannot fathom a purpose for 8 cores for any "desktop" application that isn't in the "workstation" class.
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He's right. Current desktops don't need 8 cores. However, as four cores become widely available, desktops will begin to change. They will become more threaded, and more processing that would have been avoided previously will begin to happen passively. Constantly streaming video in multiple thumbnail size icons on taskbars, stronger and more pervasive encryption on everything that enters or leaves the machine, smarter background filtering on multiple RSS sources, MUCH beefier JIT on virtual machines, on-the-fly JIT for dynamic languages, more complex client-side rendering of Web content (SVG, etc), these will all start to become more practical for constant use. Other things that we haven't even thought of because they're impactical now will also spring up. By the time 8-core systems are available, the market will already be over-taxing 4-core systems.
"Need" is subjective.
Once upon a time, Bill Gates said we would never "need" more than 640K.
Once upon a time, mainframes only had 32K of RAM -- and that was a vast amount more than their predecessors.
The '286 came out and was primarily aimed at the server and workstation market. "No one will ever need all of that power."
Thing is, people always "need" more speed, more RAM and more storage. And they'll pay for it too, so Intel may "need" to sell 8X cores.
Seems like people dont RTFA. Let me Quote "Will we see eight cores in the client in the next two years? If someone chooses to do that, engineering-wise that is possible. But I doubt this is something the market needs." He is talking about next two years not ever. We just have an abundance of dual core machines in the market now and the apps to take advantage of it. Tell me how much different software we had two years ago than today. If so there is no way a desktop market needs 8 cores two years from now. Geez we have so many fanbois and script kiddies here with absolutely no knowledge of the industry, it is sickening.
But ineffectively using 8 cores can be done by any dumbass with a C# compiler or a book on the pthreads library. Which is why we actually will need 8 cores.