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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.
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.
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.