Slashdot Mirror
Panic in Multicore Land
MOBE2001 writes "There is widespread disagreement among experts on how best to design and program multicore processors, according to the EE Times. Some, like senior AMD fellow, Chuck Moore, believe that the industry should move to a new model based on a multiplicity of cores optimized for various tasks. Others disagree on the ground that heterogeneous processors would be too hard to program. The only emerging consensus seems to be that multicore computing is facing a major crisis. In a recent EE Times article titled 'Multicore puts screws to parallel-programming models', AMD's Chuck Moore is reported to have said that 'the industry is in a little bit of a panic about how to program multicore processors, especially heterogeneous ones.'"
What Mr Moore is saying does have a grain of truth, that generic will be beaten by specific in key functions. The Amiga proved that in 1985, being able to deliver a better graphical solution than workstations costing tens of thousands more. The key now is to figure out which specifics you can use without driving up the cost nor without compromizing the design ideal of a general purpose computer.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
How is an 80-core cpu a cut down version of a dual-CPU box? This is the kind of technology the authors are discussing, not your Core2 duo MacBook...
"...the speed the user experiences has not improved much [in the last 5-7 years]."
This may almost be true if you stay on the cutting edge, but not even close for the average user (or the power-user on a budget, like myself). 5 years ago I was running a 1.2 GHz Duron. Today I have a 2.3 GHz Athlon 64 in my notebook (which is a little over a year old, I think), and an Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (that's a dual-core 2.8 GHz, for those who don't know) in my desktop. I'd be lying if I said I didn't notice much difference between the three.
For servers the real problem is I/O. Disks are slow, network bandwidth is limited (if you solve that then memory bandwidth is limited ;) ).
;).
;).
For most typical workloads most servers don't have enough I/O to keep 80 cores busy.
If there's enough I/O there's no problem keeping all 80 cores busy.
Imagine a slashdotted webserver with a database backend. If you have enough bandwidth and disk I/O, you'll have enough concurrent connections that those 80 cores will be more than busy enough
If you still have spare cores and mem, you can run a few virtual machines.
As for desktops - you could just use Firefox without noscript, after a few days the machine will be using all 80 CPUs and memory just to show flash ads and other junk
spreadsheets, video/sound/picture editing, gaming, blogging
Odd selection of examples. The processing of cells can almost trivially be allocated across 80 cores. Media work can almost trivially be split into chunks across 80 cores. Games usually relatively easy to split, either by splitiing the graphics into chunks or parallelizable physics or other parallelizable simulation aspects.
Oh, and blogging.
My optical mouse has enough processing horsepower inside for blogging.
OPTICAL MOUSE CIRCUITRY:
Has the user pressed a key?
No.
Has the user pressed a key?
No.
Has the user pressed a key?
No.
(repeat 1000 times)
Has the user pressed a key?
No.
Has the user pressed a key?
No.
Has the user pressed a key?
Yes.
OOOO! YES!
QUICK QUICK QUICK! HURRY HURRY HURRY! PROCESS A KEYPRESS! YIPEE!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.