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Intel's Quad Core CPU Reviewed
Gr8Apes is one of many to let us know that Tom's Hardware Guide has posted a review of Intel's new Kentsfield quad core processor. From the article: "Even expert opinions are deeply divided, ranging from 'more cores are absolutely necessary' to 'why do I need something more than my five-year-old PC system?' Although the Core 2 quad-core processors are not expected to hit retail channels before October, Tom's Hardware Guide had the opportunity to examine several Core 2 Quadro models in the test labs. We would like to make it clear that these samples were not provided by Intel."
Some applications will make use of it, some won't. More cores is pretty much the same as more CPUs.
Even expert opinions are deeply divided, ranging from 'more cores are absolutely necessary' to 'why do I need something more than my five-year-old PC system?
These are obviously experts who have never heard of servers.
I'm perfectly content with my 1.2GHz single-core single-processor laptop, but I'd sure as shit like to have more muscle in the database cluster I'm responsible for maintaining at work. Whether these chips are a good solution remains to be seen, but that's a separate question.
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At any point of time in the history of computer performance, to say that, "it is stupid *anything*!" is much too simplistic point of view IMHO.
Osho
From the looks of things, a Kentsfield on a 1066MHz FSB did similarly to a Kentsfield on a 1333MHz FSB, suggesting that bandwidth isn't the key issue. In fact, they scored the same on several tests (both were at the 2.67GHz standard speed). That surprised me, but I'm not complaining. Now, it may be that those tests never utilized all four cores, but it still scored head and shoulders above a E6700, suggesting that at least 3 cores were used.
it could be possible (maybe someone would tweak it in the future), but I doubt your existing crt/lcd would support that :)
What would improve is the quality of the games both in physics and in AI.
No, that's much to straight forward for Intel.
I expect something along the lines of: "Core 2 Tre Quad Pentium 405".
And AMD's AM3 5235+ 3.1G X4 Thunderon is faster and cheaper, anyhow.
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it should be spelled the quad core due owe, they think it is their due for you to owe them a lot of money for something you really don't need.
The last couple of years I am finding it extremely hard justifying upgrades. I can surf fast, web pages render fast, can already watch a nice dvd movie or listen to fairly good sound, etc, and other multitasking things-all with a barely past 1 ghz cpu and half a gig of old slow RAM and a 45 dollar vid card. If I need some "upgrade", well, I still have two empty RAM slots, and that's cheap and probably a lot more cost effective in real world use than having to upgrade to some new chip that takes a brand new mobo as well. I am trying to see where having some webpage open 5 milliseconds faster or something like that is any sort of huge advantage that I should pay hundreds of dollars for. I's not like I would kick if it was only 20 bucks or something, but....not seeing it, computers hit a "good enough" level a few years ago now it seems, and I have heard that from any number of people in meatspace as well.
I like a variety of gadgets, not just computers, and I'd say for the bulk of humanity out there, what they have right now (I am just generally speaking now) for computing power is actually filling the bill quite well. I realise that companies have to keep selling to stay in business, but this arms race is also creating a lot of planetary waste and over production of honestly unneeded stuff when it comes to computers. And cellphones are even more stupid is it REALLY necessary to get a new one and throw the old one away every few months? I would rather see this silicon (and peoples extra money they would have blown on an unneeded new computer) go to stuff like solar panels for the next few years ahead, that industry needs it a lot more and will help to drop prices there and help society as well.. I like consuming electricity and what it does, but I would like to step up to the plate and *produce* a little of it as well, especially with something that will come with a 30 year warranty like most PV panels do now.
Anyway, just a thought on this subject, I think it would be better if they told these chip places to just go into idle from a flat out race for a spell, give people a chance to really *use* what they already have, do some more R&D, and skip to every third generation or so to mass produce and sell.
Till Oracle and Microsoft revise their licensing terms to take into account multiple cores, that is.
Or do you think they're going to sacrifice all that potential revenue?
V.
Why is it so hard to get developers to write decent multi-threaded code? It's not that hard,
Let me put it this way. If all the developers in the world were as smart as you think you are, it would not be that hard. As it is, however, coming up with scalable, manageable, efficient ways of writing multi-threaded code, in a way that is future-proof, as opposed to simply optimized for todays generation of hardware, is hard. Very hard. Not as in research-subject hard, but as in continuing-research-for decades-has-still-not-brought-us-much-closer-to-a- solution hard!
, and using threads properly can almost always improve performance and/or responsiveness on single proc/core machines to boot.
Let me rephrase part of the above sentence: "using threads properly can...". Did you notice which word I emphasized? Can you guess why?
Any idiot can use threads. The difficulty is to find the right granularity of threads (which is related to what kind of hardware you've got), which tasks are parallelizable, which parallelizable tasks should (or should not) get parallelized because of communication overhead and other factors (which is also related to what kind of hardware you've got), and so on.
It is also important to note, that few existing programs are designed from scratch today. In fact, almost all existing programs were designed in the past! In the past they didn't have affordable multicore (or multi-CPU) computers. And thus, those old designs didn't take that into account.
Why is it so hard to get developers to write decent multi-threaded code? It's not that hard, and using threads properly can almost always improve performance and/or responsiveness on single proc/core machines to boot.
Because it IS harder. It introduces new pitfalls (deadlocks, livelocks, race conditions), debugging is harder (gdb with multithreaded programs.. brrr), old paradigma have to be thrown overboard (and new ones introduced, such as task- or stream-based processing). Also, threads NEVER improve performance on a single-core machine. They do help with responsiveness, however. If you want performance boosts, use a multicore machine.
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Also, threads NEVER improve performance on a single-core machine.
Unless you call blocking functions (like IO), where one thread'll block and the other(s) will keep going just fine. But yes, if you're 100% CPU bound then making it 2x50% won't help at all.
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Are you being deliberately stupid or what ?
Some things are easy to parallelise, a lot of things arent. Processing an image.. fine.. give each processor a chunk.. but wait.. you get edge artifacts since each pixel needs neighbour pixel information.. that has to be shared.. at what point does it take *longer* using multithreads.. doing a large matrix inversion that takes hours.. ok, parallelise it.. but wait.. standard algorithms that you can see in numerical recipes in C assume single thread.. u need a completely new algorithm, and u need a completely new mechanism for stabilisation bla bla bla.. and this is before u even get into resource contention etc etc.. These are not compiler issues, they are design issues, some of which are at least as hard to solve as writing the entire single thread program. Until computers are smarter than humans, they are not going to get solved automatically.
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The problem with threads:
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http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/menu
Basically, even the simplest tasks require significant armor plating to run correctly.
OTOH: Multi-PROCESS programming is far simpler than multi-THREADED programming.
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