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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 frequently run as many as 8 programs at a time, sometimes more, but I seriously doubt each program would know what to do with its own core. With my two-CPU set-up, I find RAM to be almost the biggest limiting factor (although with 2GB, I've never actually run out). There's really no need for 8 cores until my brain is able to take multitasking to the next level, doing many many complex tasks that would gain benefit from (essentially) unlimited CPU power for each program.
They say the biggest bottleneck of any modern computer is its user...
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
I recently read about a 1024-core chip for small devices like cell phones Each core ran on a simplified instruction set and specialized in a certain task like muting the microphone when incoming sounds are too quiet, smoothing text on the low resolution screen, and other minute tasks. Individual cores could be placed in low power sleep mode until the software dictated a need for that instruction set.
Is it possible to couple CISC and RISC cores on one die? Is this how the math coprocessors of the 386 era worked? This sounds like an ideal solution to me since nobody needs 4 or 8 cores to be fully powered and ready to pounce at all times.
See, here's where I have to disagree.
Imagine an RPG that has multiples (100's) of 'computer' competitors that are "developing" along the same lines as you and your character(s). Or perhaps an MMORPG with thousands of players, competing against 100's of thousands of virtual characters that are developing along the same lines as your and the mmorpg's characters. Say goodbye to random encounters with stale NPC's - and hello to enemies with unique names and playing styles - all due to the computer's ability to handle such incredible virtualization.
Adding more RAM and a minor increase in speed wouldn't help in either of these scenarios. Bring on the cores, man, and don't stop at 8...
Interestingly enough as you recompile for 64 bits, you also need more memory as you get more memory. Now your memory alignment is now 8 bytes not 4 bytes, and your pointers are much later.
I'd like to take a moment to rail against most commonly accepted forms of parallel education. I'm sure you were taught about threads, critical sections, semaphores, shared memory, etc.
These are all inherently dangerous and difficult to program concepts. Write some application that is flexible and can run with N threads - usually this is hard, the best solution from Java-land is the concurrency toolkit which defines units of work which can be parallelized by a thread pool.
However, there _is_ another way. "CSP" - communicating sequential programs. This is a method of writing naturally parallel systems that do not have the disadvantages of all of the above. (Standard concurrency debugging suggestion in java: "make the method synchronized") A practical example of this is the programming language Erlang. Ericsson invented this language to write high performance telco gear. Their ATM switch line is written in it. In Erlang you have many many 'processes' (not traditional OS processes, but defined in the VM) which cannot share memory - the only way they can communicate is via async messages. You can build a synchronous call on top of async messages pretty trivially (after all, all syncronous network protocols are based on IP which is asynchronous). You never have to worry about memory stomps, or critical sections. You _do_ have to design your applications differently, but it is most definitely worth it.
Another interesting thing about this is your applications naturally parallelize. The "R11" release was just put out, which included SMP support. The previous versions would only use 1 CPU, but this version will use all your CPUs, which means if you have multiple processes ready to run, they'll run on as many CPUs you have! Instant SMP support, no redesign, no RECOMPILE necessary.
This kind of language technology is what is necessary to get us to the next level. A similar thing is possible with Functional languages such as OCaml, Haskell, etc.
I've been working in the industry for 5 years and I'm currently working on a Erlang project. My company was fairly conservative in terms of languages, there was a standing order (until about 2000) "no C++".
Actually, I've been discussing this with a friend recently.
Take NWN for instance. How about making a game where things are REALLY happening? So far most worlds are extremely static. MMORPGs are static in that nothing ever changes, you kill the Lord of Evil and he's back on his dark throne 5 minutes later. And in most RPGs things just stay there and wait for you to appear (say, you never miss a battle in progress, as they just stay there until you appear nearby so that you can conveniently join the battle).
For example, in NWN it's very clear that there are multiple factions living in the area. How about having kobolds, knolls, wolves, etc move around on their own, gather food, kill each other, reproduce, try to invade, etc? Wouldn't it be neat if you could defeat the gnolls, then wander off for whatever reason, and when you return find the kobolds now took over the gnoll cave, increased their population, and Tymofarrar got out of the cave and set fire to the town?
Of course, make it too realistic and it gets a bit weird... imagine having to kill kobold children and walking on gnolls having sex.