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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."
For a moment, I hoped Intel had come out with something like AMD's rumored reverse-Hyperthreading. That would be a real revolution!
Nuffsaid
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Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
It seems like a tacit admission from Intel that multi-threaded apps haven't caught up with the availability of multi-core CPUs.
Or maybe Intel, unlike the story submitter, knows that many apps simply do not lend themselves to multithreading and parallelism. It's not about "catching up".
Multi-core for multithreaded apps? Check.
Trying to get each core as fast as possible for when it's only used by one single-threaded app? Check.
Makes sense to me.
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Why should they? The advent of multicore CPUs won't actually hurt single-threaded apps. They just won't get any faster. For most things, that's fine. Legacy apps that aren't changing are most likely already fast enough. Besides, not everything can be parallelized properly, anyway. Multithreaded applications will become more popular, but I think this trend will affect new applications much more than old ones because it's just not that important. Even new apps don't necessarily need parallelization because many things are "fast enough" on a single core.
By the way, I actually hope that many things never become multithreaded. In my experience, most coders simply aren't capable of thinking threading through clearly. For many people, the concept is just too complex. Hopefully, compilers will improve to the point where many things can be parallelized without the coder having to know very much, if anything, about the threading involved, but, today, we're nowhere near that. We desperately need higher-level threading primitives in computer science.
Because when I'm encoding a movie I want my UI to be responsive.
Taking advantage of multiple cores with a single-threaded per-client application just requires having more than one simultaneous user on your server. It doesn't at all require having a multi-threaded application per client. Most HTTP connections don't do anything very fancy, and really won't be helped much internally by multiple cores. The web server software itself, the database server, the fact that popular sites (or shared servers) get more than one visitor at a time, and similar concerns will make a much bigger difference with multiple cores than making a CRUD application or a blog multi-threaded.
In my experience, most coders simply aren't capable of thinking threading through clearly
;-)
I agree completely, though you can expect to catch some flack for that one, from the hoardes of poor coders who think nothing (or rather, who don't think about the implications) of splitting off another thread to boost performance (even in a single core environment).
Personally, I consider myself a damned good coder - And I avoid multithreading wherever possible. If I really need the raw CPU power, I'll usually try to model it as a full slave process before resorting to messy threading.
We desperately need higher-level threading primitives in computer science.
We've had it for decades - Just look for multiprocessor support, and you have implicit multithreaded support automatically.
As one "mature" implementation, we could all start coding in HPF. I'd personally rather gnaw my own right leg off, but, to each their own.
By virtue of being "extensible", EFI is vastly better than the BIOS
Yeah... Why, that nasty ol' standard BIOS makes hardware-level DRM just so pesky. And vendor lock-in for replacement hardware? Almost impossible! Why, how will Dell ever survive if it can't force you to use Dell-branded video cards as your only upgrade option? And of course, WGA worked so well, why not include it at the firmware level? Bought a "OS-less" PC, did we? No soup for you!
Sorry, EFI has some great potential, but it has far too much potential for vendor abuse. The (somewhat) standardized PC BIOS has made the modern era of ubiquitous computers possible. Don't take a "step forward" too quickly without first looking to see if it will send you over a cliff.
Not really. It just makes improvements and DRM hacks. Add a TPM module to a BIOS-based system and include support in the OS and it will be just as effective for MS's purposes as an EFI one. BIOS makes modern hardware a pain in the butt. The fact that DRM modules are modern hardware is sort of orthogonal to the issue.
And vendor lock-in for replacement hardware? Almost impossible! Why, how will Dell ever survive if it can't force you to use Dell-branded video cards as your only upgrade option?Umm, Dell is not even the biggest player in a market that is not monopolized. If Dell requires Dell branded video cards and people care (most probably won't) then people will switch to a vendor that does not do this and Dell will change or die. I don't think Dell or any other PC vendor has enough influence to force such a scheme upon the existing graphics card makers. Only MS really has that much influence and I don't think they have the motivation.
Bought a "OS-less" PC, did we? No soup for you!I don't think you have to worry about this problem unless you're running Windows on it.
Sorry, EFI has some great potential, but it has far too much potential for vendor abuse.I disagree. I don't see that vendors will abuse this any more than they already abuse BIOS. In any case, the change is coming. You just need to decide which side of the curve you want to be on. (Typed from an EFI laptop.)