What is Digg?94 Comments
- warlordwiggles, on 09/07/2008, -3/+37"Defence" is a British variation of "defense," like "flavour" to "flavor" or "colour" to "color."
- Koosebane, on 10/12/2007, -1/+25THIS JUST IN:
Man killed by catastrophic hard drive failure, film at eleven. - Tialys, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18Makes perfect sense. This is just a step on the way. In about 8 months, we'll be looking at 6-8 cores, or more and quad core will be standard in most computers.
- sockpuppets, on 10/12/2007, -10/+26I checked everywhere for my multi-core. In defence, in delawn, in degarage. It's lost.
- davodavo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16"i wouldnt compain if my hard drive could spin at 30,000 rpm and transfer my movie files in seconds"
Why not just install a jet engine in your computer? - roominator, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Verily, thou speekest the sooth
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11i have no problem with companies creating hardware that is beyond the needs of the current software. is better to have too much power than be throttling the limit all the time.
hard drives are the slowest component in a computer. i wouldnt compain if my hard drive could spin at 30,000 rpm and transfer my movie files in seconds - Tialys, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12No, but you can parallelize seperate applications. For example using one to to quickly encode video doesn't slow anything at all down as you chat on another, browse on another. It's removing slowdown by seperating where the data goes. For this to work well though, the OS has to get smarter about distributing tasks to different cores.
- cbreaker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Radu, you miss the point completely.
You're thinking is backwards. The reason all the software you mention doesn't make use of truly multi-threading and thus full use of multiple CPU's is because nary a workstation would have more then one CPU. With dual-core and beyond in every PC, this will change quite rapidly.
It's not all about getting absolute top performance, either. Having multiple discrete CPU's available can help with overall user experience, too. You could dedicate a processor to direct user impact processes such as typing in a word processor or navigating user interfaces, and use the other CPU's for background tasks. Your clicking and typing will always be extremely responsive. While this is a simplistic example, who knows what the future could bring with multi-core.
Then there IS the performance issue. Maybe you don't realize it, but CPU makers are running into some serious road-blocks for performance increases in single CPU's. There's only so many Ghz you can run a single CPU at before the laws of physics (you know, speed of light type stuff) become a stopping block. There's been improvements here and there lately, but nothing as significant as 5 years ago when performance was simply doubled or tripled every six months. With that in mind, multi-core/multi-CPU is really the only way to sustain any significant performance increases that are needed to further computing technology. Getting it out there now is the only way software will be written to take advantage of it in the future. When the software gets better at using it, multi-core technology will also improve.
There's more to technology then the immediate; it's always been that way. Why can't you see that? - gwolf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10There has been a lot of talk of hybrid flash ram hard drives being in the pipeline. Maybe that’s your solution. The weakest link seems like the best place to enhance performance.
- mxfreak92, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10mmmmmmm.......ray tracing
- Spikito, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11actually davo, some guys are working on a mini jet engine, about an inch in diameter, that attaches to the back of a laptop, using the battery slot as a fuel tank, to generate power. one tank of fuel provides about 8 hours, I'm not ***** you, saw a prototype about 3 months ago.
- pickypg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9It's foolish to be against multi-core chips, unless you're going against the fact that eventually you will be talking a lot more power consumption, again.
Even basic programs will eventually be better because of the normal nature of seeing multi-core processors in computers in the coming years because more software will be designed with multi-threading in mind (as beee said).
From a programming stand point, there is not much that cannot be multi-threaded. It's really just a matter of difficulty. - cuposmuck, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9I still think this guys vision is lacking.. multi-core 4+is the stepping stone for intel and AMD into the new age reconfigable cpus. the current age of reconfigurable cpus run around 166hmz - 500mhz with any from 50-1000 sub cores, they are upto 100 times faster than 3GHz intel/amd cpu, and produce 50% less heat at worst.
no bull.. stretch(one of the startups for this stuff) did an EEMBC benchmark and flogged the current best CPU/DSP.. read it here http://www.stretchinc.com/news/pr_042604.php
my guess is that that intel (and i guess AMD as well) are most likely targeting reconfigurable CPUs that use homogeneous cores..
the only problem with the current range of reconfigurables is they are not upto mainstream consumer level yet.. they require the porting of software and have various lingering hardware problems.. but slowly such restrictions are being removed.. give it a few years and the parallel compilers/behavioral synthesizers(or want ever the new compilers end up getting called) and reconfigurables will be the perfected, production ready and mainstream items. - pantuky, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Perform the following experiment if you like:
Hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete.
You will see your Windows task manager.
Go to the view menu
Click on “Select Columns”
Click on the “Thread Count” check box, make sure it is checked.
Make sure you are looking at the “Processes” Tab.
A new column will be visible; it is called “Threads”
Click on the thread column a couple of times.
This will sort the list of processes by the number of threads they are running.
My System process is running 105 threads all by itself
My svchost is running 66 threads
My anti-virus is running 48 threads.
My ATI driver is running two sets of 36 threads
Firefox is running 14 ***** threads
Modo 202 can now render with 16 threads.
We are plenty multi-threaded. Don't give me this "Our software isn't multi-threaded" crap anymore. - DigitAl56K, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8What is to 'defend' around multi-core? Everyone is going to see a performance boost by investing in a multi-core processor. It is true that many applications are not designed to be multi-threaded, and sometimes certain tasks just don't lend themselves very well to parrallel processing, but in general multi-core is going to do two things: 1) Genuinely allow your system to run multiple CPU intensive tasks with very few performance issues, and 2) Provide a platform that encourages developers to actually write multi-threaded applications and see the benefit of doing so.
Arguing against multi-core is like arguing that we don't really need bigger hard drives, or 640K of memory is enough for anyone, and who is going to use pixel shaders anyway? It's debate for the sake of debate. - Murdats, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8you know, I do have some spare time
and I have been needing to find a use for that jet engine in the backyard - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Does it really matter if multi-cores make that big of a difference today?
This is a step in a good direction and improving computing, it's certainly not hurting it. Soon rather than later multi-cores will the defacto standard in desktop computing. - vertigoblue, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7my VB hello world program begs to differ...
- M4tt3r, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7@ Spikito
These? http://www.microjeteng.com/album.html - DigitAl56K, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I don't think we are anywhere near the point yet that 2, 4, or even 8 cores are too many for most people. Looking forward, 40 or 80 cores might sound ridiculous today - in fact it is rediculous today, but we have to think about the applications of the future. How much processing power is it going to take for our us to interact with a computer through speech, or computer vision? When will I be able to compose music by humming tunes to my PC and having it assist me by putting all the parts together so that it sounds good? When will my computer be able to physically follow me around my home while keeping on top of all the software I'm running on it?
The question boils down to "Is what we have today good enough?". The answer is "Yes" when you plan to do only the things you do today the way you do them today forever. - Otto, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Get perpendicular!
- davodavo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I bet it would've been even funnier and REALLY shown the submitter who's boss if that hadn't been an erroneous correction.
- TeacherOfHeroes, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Not to nit pick, but to be fair, defense would be the american variation of the standard spelling, Considering that England is the country of origin for the language.
- Mugsleymug, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6i'd digg that
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Would not a solution to this be higher density disks, so the drive could spin at the same speed as normal harddrives yet access more data more quickly? Seems to make sense...
- Nebbie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Sure there is software that doesn't take advantage of multi-core CPUs. Most of that software doesn't take advantage of single core CPUs either though.
When someone lists all the programs the average computer user uses that wont see any benefit from multi-core, it's usually because they aren't dependent on CPU speed in the first place. If those are the only programs you run, then you don't need a fast single core either. Does that mean fast single cores are a waste too?
In any multitasking OS, multiple processors will almost always be better then 1. Grandma doesn't need a 3Ghz 4core processor, but what if she was running a low power 1Ghz 4core processor? What if each core could individually be shut down like AMD is planning? It would be a cheaper CPU, and would use less power. The closer we get to this 4Ghz barrier Intel and AMD have found, the more power it takes to run these things, and the more costly they are to make.
I also think it's safe to say that any program that uses 100% of a single core CPU could be made to take advantage of multiple cores. If it doesn't use 100% of a single core, then your CPU is just too fast for it anyways and it doesn't matter if it takes advantage of more cores.
I just don't get the negative attitude I see everywhere when it comes to multi-cores. - Tijmen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary. "
- James Nicoll - livestradamus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Is this new hardware overkill - too much, too soon?
No it's about f**king time - TeacherOfHeroes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@directedition
English is a combination of Germanic and French, the French being derived from Latin, and the both the Latin and the Germanic being derived from an even older Indo-European language that is unknown.
That being said, there are standardized versions of the language, and there have been since the invention of the dictionary.
You are correct, though. The English language is a mess, as as such, a single standardization should be selected. This opposed to your suggestion of just spelling words any old way you feel like, you welifyul. Currently its a fight between the British and the American standards, and international favour tends to keep swinging back and forth between the two. Presently, the British one seems to be gaining more popularity, especially in Europe as the EU becomes a more and more cohesive unit.
Oh, and by the way, in the British spelling, the word is theatre. in the American spelling, the word is theater, although it seems that you are not alone in your confusion, seeing as web sites such as nytheater.com and nytheatre.com both seem active at the moment. - cbreaker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4benitojuarez: "by the time applications that support 4 cores become mainstream the tech will be old and we'll have 6, 8, or even 10 cores being pushed on us."
Well, the thing is, when you write software to make use of multiple threads, chances are good it will scale with the number of processors you have. Take some sort of graphics rendering application as an example: If it's written to distribute the load of rendering the frame across multiple threads, then logic would follow that rendering speed will increase by adding more processors.
And it is true that while server-type software by it's nature scales well with multiple processors, it's also been designed this way for a long time because servers quite often have more then one processor. While you might not be able to see where user applications could benefit in the same way, I can think of lots of ways things could be parallelized in current software like games. I mean, I'm not the only one. Valve thinks the same thing, and they're successful in increasing performance in a typically single-threaded application. - davodavo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@hammydude:
Seagate did that already. It's called perpendicular recording.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recording - BadassCheese, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I can't wait till the day we stop measuring CPUs with GHZ and start saying,"i just upgraded from1200[cores] to 1800"
- etnu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4A web browser can most certainly use more than one core, assuming the system is designed well enough to be able to put different threads on different cores:
- One thread for user interaction
- Multiple threads for simultaneous downloading
- A separate thread for the JS / rendering engine on each active tab
In fact, they already do.
Nothing benefited from multi-threading years ago when it was just wasting time. On a single core, multi-threading is absolutely pointless because you're just dividing time on the same CPU. You're much better doing some sort of async I/O.
However, when multiple cores are involved, you can't usually leverage the other cores within a single app without multi threading (or multi processing if that's suitable for the application type). That means that multi-threading is absolutely critical.
Multi-threading is not really all that hard. People make it hard, usually because they either:
1. Don't know how to program
or
2. Are too concerned with minor performance issues and "academic" definitions of performance optimization (academic CS is far behind the real world these days since they're pretty much teaching kids the same thing today as they were teaching them in the 70s and 80s).
#1 can't be fixed. #2 can be, it will just take time. Classic examples of #2 type problems:
- Copy on write containers / strings
- Global variables
- Static buffers
All of these things lead to huge problems in multi-threaded apps. The usual fix is to toss locks around everything. This just makes performance worse, because anything you gain from the minor benefits here are going to be eaten up by locking overhead (or worse, your threads hang). You'd be much better off just eating the extra computation and leveraging the additional CPUs.
Chips aren't going to get significantly faster any time soon. Suck it up and learn to multi-thread (or, if writing a socket server, to multi-process, which is far simpler). - radu79, on 10/12/2007, -7/+10Yes, but how many CPU hungry tasks are you going to usually do at a time?
Tasks that are CPU hungry:
1. Games
2. Video/sound compression.
3. Backups (because of the compression)
4. 3D programs (rendering)
Now, all those tasks require more than just the CPU. They also fight on the memory, and HDD access.
And the cores also fight on the memory, they can't access the memory at the same time, so 3 have to wait while one does the work. Which is a big bottleneck. - etnu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@radu:
Yeah, but most practical algorithms actually benefit tremendously from, and are trivially parallelized. Fibonacci numbers aren't very commonly used in applications, but quicksort is, and it's definitely an algorithm which can be parallelized quite well.
Pretty much any routine that looks like this can be trivially parallelized:
for each item in set
do something with item
Simply change them to:
for each item in set
dispatch item to thread for processing
Although more often than not, you're not going to actually be putting individual algorithms on separate threads. More likely, you'll be doing things like event-driven programming, which is definitely a paradigm which benefits from multi-threading. - hackwrench, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"I checked everywhere for my multi-core. In defence, in delawn, in degarage. It's lost."
No, no, no... See defence? See all the links in defence? Those are all cores. So we have defence of multi-core. What the author is doing in there is another question altogether. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I find it that computers will soon be far more organised motherboard wise using mutli-core technology, and pretty much we'll soon favour at least dual core in every desktop and notebook machine.
- MatttK, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@Mug: Go right ahead.
http://digg.com/tech_news/A_Laptop_Powered_by_a_Jet_Engine - beee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4good article.
I think we're going to see a steady progress in multi-threading, but I'm interested to see what applications *can't* be multi-threaded in the long run in the same way that I'm interested to see what can be multi-threaded. - shrewduser, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7i find it difficult to think of something that can't be designed to benefit from multiple cores at all...
- msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Simplistic applications do not benefit from multiple cores. The coding required to support it could be more work than the implementation without, with little or no benefit gained from the extra work.
- aximbigfan, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5...
i think i would like it better if hardware advanced faster then software...
my reason being is that with software advancing faster then hardware, if your hardware doesn't support the new stuff your screwed. if hardware advanced faster then software then if your software doesn't support something that your hardware does, no biggie.
... - cbreaker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3cuposmuck: We've all be hearing about this great tech or that great tech that will blow away existing microprocessors for years. It never seems to come to fruition. While I do agree that eventually (perhaps inevitably) the task of crunching numbers will be performed in new and interesting ways in the future, we have a need for current types of processing now and for the foreseeable future.
I would never say that new and divergent technologies shouldn't be researched - they absolutely need to be. It's baby steps. Right now, dual/multi-core is a step in the right direction and AMD nor Intel should be criticized for doing it - particularly when the criticism comes in the form of not adopting radically new technologies that has significant issues with today's uses. - RealityBender, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2PhysicPU
- TeacherOfHeroes, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3There is one difference in the analogy you gave regarding the 640K one-liner. Yes, there will always be use for the hardware that is produced, and IF intel ever gets around to making that 80 core chip that they've been yapping about, someone will find a way to use all 80 cores.
My question to you is this; at what point does the consumer niche that will find 80 cores substantially better than 40 get so small that it becomes worthless to mass-produce those 80 core processors?
If you ask me, there is a practical limit to the number of cores you need in order to read email, word process, and use the internet. Few people will ALWAYS need yet another core - those people would be mostly in large computational projects (Medicine, graphics rendering, astrophysics, whatever)
Intel is just making silly promises, just like they did several years ago (2003?), when they promised to get that blast-furnace of a processor architecture (Pentium 4 net-burst) up to 10GHz within a few years - a deadline which (IIRC) has passed us by. - deathcode, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Well.. there's a unique and truly reason why the tendency aims to multicore.
By the year 2014 is expected that the Moore's Law won't be valid anymore.
Technology is reaching its limits in aspects like chips size, materials, voltage.
We currently have circuitry that is working at atomic level, an heat is becoming an issue as well. That's the main reason why parallel processing (read Multi core) came up to the scene.
now it's the turn of software developers to create the frameworks for multi threading programming. Pretty sure .NET Framework X.0 will provide transparent support for multi threading programming, same with JVM and other compilers/interpreters. - kiwimonk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Nothing wrong with too much cpu.. we can start using it for always on voice command recognition.. Among other not so needed things.
- pantuky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Everything that is CPU intensive is pretty close 183% faster on a dual core vis-a-vis the same single core at the same speed. We do loose a little to overhead, but the gain is formitable.
- Scruffydan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1except for money spent of hardware, you are not taking full advantage of.
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