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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."
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.