Slashdot Mirror
Intel's Single Thread Acceleration
SlinkySausage writes "Even though Intel is probably the industry's biggest proponent of multi-core computing and threaded programming, it today announced a single thread acceleration technology at IDF Beijing. Mobility chief Mooly Eden revealed a type of single-core overclocking built in to its upcoming Santa Rosa platform. It seems like a tacit admission from Intel that multi-threaded apps haven't caught up with the availability of multi-core CPUs. Intel also foreshadowed a major announcement tomorrow around Universal Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) — the replacement for BIOS that has so far only been used in Intel Macs. "We have been working with Microsoft," Intel hinted."
EFI is used by more than just Apple. For example, HP Itanium systems use EFI. By virtue of being "extensible", EFI is vastly better than the BIOS which has frankly failed to evolve since Compaq reverse engineered it in the early 1980s.
It is well past time that BIOS went to the grave.
Intel's "Enhanced Dynamic Acceleration Technology" is a triumph of marketing. Notice how the focus is on the transition where one core becomes inactive and the other one speeds up. This is the good transition. The other transition, where the chip workload increases & voltage/frequency are limited to keep within a power envelope, is called "throttling" and is much disliked in the user community.
Don't get me wrong, this is valuable technology. It is important that microprocessors efficiently use the power available to them. Having a choice on a single chip between a high-performance, high-power single-thread engine & a set of lower-performance, lower-power engines has great promise. But, the way this is presented is a big victory for marketing.
With all this talk of multi-threading on multi-core CPUs, Slashdotters appear to have forgotten that we all run multi-tasking operating systems. An OS isn't forced to schedule all of the threads of a single application between cores: it's perfectly capable of spreading several different single-threaded applications between cores, too.
And no, EFI didn't appear first on Intel Macs. Intel Macs weren't even the first x86-based machines to employ it.
I did my MS thesis on a topic very similar to this. Trust me, it's not worth it. While some applications that have inherent parallelism (image manipulation, movie encoding/decoding, etc) can see between 2x to 4x improvements when dynamically threaded, the majority of your basic applications are too linear and have too many dependencies between instructions for dynamic threading to really be worth the investment in hardware.
Space for rent, inquire within
Rather than answer that question, I will ask another. Why would hardware manufacturers such as Intel and AMD want to limit their market by crippling the hardware to only run certain software? It is unlikely in the extreme that open source operating systems will be locked out, and that is what really matters.
As I understand it, UEFI will enable some thoroughly nasty DRM, but only so far as the OS vender chooses to take it. Apple and Microsoft will almost certainly make it a miserable experience for all involved, but will probably tire of shooting themselves in the feet at some point. There are alternatives after all and they are looking better every day.
Seriously, several constructs in Fortran are designed specifically for parallel execution. The language itself makes it hard to write code that the compiler can't heavily optimise. There's a reason why variable aliasing is strongly controlled in Fortran and why function parameters have an 'intent' attribute. Then there are constructs such as WHERE, which is by its very nature implicitly a parallel set of operations.