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Inside Intel's $20M Multicore Research Program
An anonymous reader writes "You may have heard about Intel's and Microsoft's efforts to finally get multi-core programming into gear so that there actually will be a developer who can program all those fancy new multicore processors, which may have dozens of core on one chip within a few years. TG Daily has an interesting article about the project, written by one of the researchers. It looks like there is a lot of excitement around the opportunity to create a new generation of development tools. Let's hope that we will soon see software that can exploit those 16+core babies. 'The problem of multi-core programming is staring at us right now. I am not sure what Intel's and Microsoft's expectations are, but it is quite possible that they are in fact looking at fundamental results from the academic centers to leverage their large work force to polish and realize the ideas that come forth. It calls for a much closer collaboration between the centers and the companies than it appears at first sight.'"
./configure --num-cores=16
SMT processors of this type are only useful for accelerating a certain type of problem set, and useless for most general computing.
We've had SIMD multicore PC's forever, and they're useless as desktops. I write this from a quad xeon machine, repurposed as my dev box, as CPU1 grinds away at about 75% all day long, the rest idle. It's been like that for more than a decade, it'll be like that until MIMD hits the street with a whole new paradigm of programming languages behind it - a handful of C compiler #pragma directives from intel isn't going to make this work.
It's not simply a matter of "coders don't know how to do it." It's a matter of these multi-core "general purpose" CPUs are only really useful for a fairly limited set of specific problems.
Eg; writing a game engine with a video thread, audio thread and an input thread still leaves 13 cores idle. You really cant thread those much farther (the ridiculously parallel problem of rendering is handled by the GPU).
Simply starting processes on different procs doesn't help all that much, since they all fight over memory and I/O time. The point of diminishing returns is reached fairly quickly.
But hey, if all you do is run Folding@home so you can compare your e-cock with the other kids on hardextremeoverclockermegahackers.com, well I have some good news!
As for me, I'm seeing AMD's multiple specific purpose core approach as being more viable, as far as actually making my next desktop computer perform faster.
Savain says it best at rebelscience.org: "Even after decades of research and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on making multithreaded programming easier, threaded applications are still a pain in the ass to write."
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Unless the next version of Windows requires a core dedicated to the OS or something in the future.
So, uh, you haven't Vista yet, I see...