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183 Comments
- mark076h, on 07/01/2008, -3/+58The Intel KiloCore Extreme Processor, sounds pretty nice
- awesometastic1, on 07/01/2008, -8/+55the problem is of course that it doesn't matter how many cores you have, if you can't increase speed to memory, it does you absolutely no good. further, it is near impossible to break up a lot of processing problems into many pieces. So sure having 20 or 30 cores is going to increase speed (say if you have a bunch of apps open). But with current programming languages and the upper limit on efficiency between breaking problems up onto separate processors (see The Corollary of Modest Potential by L Snyder), having 1000's of cores is going to do us absolutely no good whatsoever in the personal computing realm.
I mean, my laptop only has two cores and they pretty much sit at 0-5% usage the vast majority of the time. I guess, when we have 1000's of cores we can all marvel at them all sitting at 0% usage all the time except for the one or two that are actually handling running apps.
Now of course the place where having 1000's of cores each with a separate bus to memory could be really handy is web farms. Instead of literally needing tons of servers you could hook one server with a few hundred gigs of ram up to a nice sized RAID array and vuala, web farm. - swordedge, on 07/01/2008, -5/+46The problem as I see it is code. Code MUST be written for multiple cores to run any faster. While I don't know what percentage of programmers are capable of coding for multiple cores, I believe it to be under half.
Lets say you have a two D shootem up space game where there are 16 robot ships in addition to your own and your friends. Each ship gets its own thread. Code for each thread has to have some of its own memory space but also needs to access community memory. It must NEVER just write to that memory else it overwrite something that another thread put in. It has to issue a code that says, "I am writing this address", then wait till it gets permission, then write to that community memory, then undo the code. Also, keeping track of what 16 or how ever many robot ships there are means running a very active database. Game programmers are NOT database administrators. They often use a messaging system to communicate between threads. The main thread becomes a glorified message handler. This whole scenario gets real complicated real fast. Writing good multithreaded code is not easy. This report simply means that coders must step up and make sure they can code for more than one processor if they want to be hired in the future. - mcduck, on 07/02/2008, -4/+40We must mail Intel this comment before they waste more money researching this. Clearly they have no idea what their talking about.
- rac1234, on 07/01/2008, -1/+27I'm ready to start coding for it if Intel are ready to give me one to practise on.
- seltaeb4, on 07/02/2008, -1/+26Just in time for Duke Nukem Forever.
- grumpyrain, on 07/02/2008, -3/+26* voila
- inactive, on 07/01/2008, -2/+24So... does this mean that the army already has it?
- pwnerofnoobs, on 07/02/2008, -2/+22he said vuala and he meant it godamn it.
- kjd84, on 07/02/2008, -0/+17Was I the only one that read Vuala as Vulva??
- jumanous, on 07/02/2008, -9/+26hundreds? Which GPU do you have?? They have plenty of pipelines and pixel shaders.. but cores... no.
- unluckier, on 07/02/2008, -2/+18That may be just about enough to run Symantec Antivirus without slowing the system to a crawl!
- zyklon, on 07/02/2008, -0/+15The name alone would sell me.
- invinciblechunk, on 07/02/2008, -1/+14Nvidia GPUs have had hundreds of ALUs (128 on the 8800 GTX, 240 on the GTX 280) for a while now. Normally these are only used for shaders, but with the CUDA SDK, they are also exposed as proper general-purpose processing cores, which can be programmed using C++ and threading. Context switches are hardware-accelerated, too.
If you're going to be ignorant, at least try to do it quietly. - jman583, on 07/02/2008, -1/+14Or gamers, who NEED the speed... or else.
- goldenmug8, on 07/02/2008, -1/+14Computers are used by people other than normal everyday people...such as scientists and engineers who NEED that speed.
- chazza125, on 07/02/2008, -3/+16The Unified Shader Architecture actually consists of hundreds of 'modules' which can actually be classified as self contained 'cores'.
See: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2053309 ... - zyklon, on 07/02/2008, -3/+16Exactly. Unless he's spilt the beans about some mega-secret project he was alone privy for.
- malekov, on 07/02/2008, -2/+12Just like the brain. Trillions of cores (neurons) though they are a bit slow (due to electro-chemical limits) = great capacity of pattern recognition and don't generate almost any heat.
- MattBD, on 07/02/2008, -0/+9If they get up to millions, it'd be MegaCore.
- sponeil, on 07/02/2008, -0/+9jumanous is wrong, invinciblechunk is right. Since the GeForce 8000 series cards came out with unified shaders, they have 100+ cores which can be used as general-purpose processors.
invinciblechunk is wrong about one thing, though. Digg is not a site where people keep their ignorance quiet. - turpialito, on 07/02/2008, -0/+9@ awesometastic1:
I disagree with the core usage part as follows: I'm an architect. I designed a 5 br house with lots of detail (trees, ashtrays, plants, utensils, appliances, etc). It took me a full night to render an 11-second animation on a P4EE@3.73GHz (6 GB RAM). On a Core2Duo@2.66GHz (same RAM) the same animation took about a third less. Okay, so the cores would sit idle while I'm not rendering or while I read my mail or whatever, but I sure could use as many cores as I gan get my hands on to increase my productivity. Plus, I'm sure you can break up a CPU-intensive render among however many cores you have. I think the same goes for CGI movie makers, video editors, etc. I think you'll find plenty of market for multicore processors. - bfisch1983, on 07/02/2008, -1/+9I am shocked that intel would fixate on a somewhat meaninless number, tell us it's the most important number, and then market they chips by constantly increasing the super important number. They just aren't the same company they used the be....
- mythril, on 07/02/2008, -2/+10http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
specifically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law#Parall ... - ba5e, on 07/02/2008, -1/+9The whole reason for this article is to state the developers must prepare to write code that is efficient over many more than 2-4 cores. So if they do this, for example with 100 cores then each core may be loaded with 1%. on a regular chip (one core) in the same class as the 100 core chip it would be 100% load.
- kaiwai, on 07/02/2008, -1/+8Or you could just call it "Intel Hard Core - Throbbing power within your grasp"
- voodooray, on 07/02/2008, -3/+10Zzzzz... Someone wake me when you can virtualise all those corez into a single cpu that every application ever made can take advantage of without having had to have been specifically built to do so. Until then, this is nothing but a marketing exercise.
- andrewtheart, on 07/02/2008, -1/+8Too slow for me. I'm saving up for a simple quantum computer, which will make these sort of processors worthy of a McDonald's toy.
- inactive, on 07/02/2008, -4/+10It's over NINE THOUSAAAAAAAND!
- inactive, on 07/01/2008, -2/+8I can see this coming miles ahead. The two titans clash, Intel vs Nvidia. Oh yeah... =) More competition = better products released faster, with lower prices. Competition = Good for us, the customers.
- inactive, on 07/02/2008, -0/+6hey, go back to your cave.
- inactive, on 07/02/2008, -2/+8oh hi
- senfo, on 07/02/2008, -0/+6That was kind of the point of awesometastic1's comment. It's easier to say we should split up tasks so that they can be spawned across multiple processors than it is to actually do it. Furthermore, it takes a much better software engineer to write multi-threaded code. In addition to this, context switching is still expensive in modern operating systems. Truth is, it's rare that I see or write CPU intensive code that executes across more than two or three threads. More often than not, the worst latency occurs because of disk IO while the CPU patiently waits for something to do.
Software design patterns for writing multi-threading applications are still being developed. Even Microsoft is getting in on the fun with its Parallel Extensions Framework, which Microsoft hopes will make it easier to write applications that scale to take advantage of parallel hardware.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/defaul ...
We're really just getting started. I wouldn't be so bold as to say that we'll never require 1,000's of cores (I'm sure there are many data centers and super computers that could make use of this technology), but it's probably going to be a while before desktop computers will come close to requiring such a large number of cores. - Drizzit, on 07/02/2008, -2/+8Why should software writers need to write for thousands of cores. It's inefficient. The cores should be able to see an incoming task and split it up between themselves. Let the coder worry about the App not how it's going to be processed.
Apple and Sun have already developed this type of technology. I think IBM has as well. - Stormwern, on 07/02/2008, -1/+7Reminds me of "***** Everything, We're Doing Five Blades" :)
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930 - fenrir, on 07/02/2008, -0/+5It actually does produce mobile processors, I think.
- lengau, on 07/02/2008, -1/+6You're right. Their meaningless number is now number of processors in the computer rather than number of Megahertz of the one processor. Oh boy... How times have changed...
(That said, when they first got into the business, they were a lot better about it, but this sort of thing has been going on for over a decade). - caoilte, on 07/02/2008, -0/+5In other words, "time to learn Erlang folks!"
- Kamujin, on 07/02/2008, -0/+5@nycmac247
Yes, I've also come to take what Apple says with a grain of salt. IE, their "64 bit" leopard. Which is actually a 32bit OS that supports 64bit mode switching. There is nothing in the Grand Central announcement that is even slightly novel. Many people are working on parallel libraries, so I just hope Apple is smart enough to clone the best one.
Look, I have a MBP right here on my desk. Apple makes nice products, but most of the things they "invent" wind up on the trash heap of history. Apple does way better when it takes other people's technology and makes it shiny. - BassJunkie, on 07/02/2008, -0/+5I wholly agree, multiple cores on a CPU are pretty much redundant without the programmes to utilize them properly. I think we are starting to see the beggining of this with Adobe making use of multi core system's on Photoshop with the multicore mac's, where rendering task's are divided up amongst the available processor cores.
As the OP states, where this sort of technology will come in useful is in servers, especially with the growing interest in virtualization, being able to cram more cores into something the same physical size as current servers means more can be done at once. This is all based on the assumption that the other system buses can be developed at the same speed, so we need much faster ram and HDDs to support the CPU. - MindStalker, on 07/02/2008, -1/+5What if a compiler was written that used the thousands of cores for branch optimization, say you have a 1000 cores, you set 800 cores for branching and have each of those cores follow a different branch of the program before it even gets to the decision?
- Charlotte_Web, on 07/02/2008, -0/+4My understanding of the problem is the diminishing returns of adding more cores. That is, you have to factor in the processing power needed to manage the traffic between the cores, and the more cores you add, the more traffic management you have to do in an increasing amount. The performance gains relative to the number of cores added slopes downward rather sharply beyond a certain point.
- inactive, on 07/02/2008, -2/+6I just upgraded to core 2 duo, too
*sniff* - Russelllucid, on 07/02/2008, -3/+7If Intel gives me a test chip I'll actually learn to code!
- inactive, on 07/02/2008, -1/+5The next step: thousands of processors in one CPU
- proficient, on 07/02/2008, -0/+4I would like to see fractional cores...
- abrasion, on 07/02/2008, -1/+5Yep, and when it is slow, 99% of the time it's due to the dopey 1960's technology of a magnetic hard disk :( good lord where are decent, fast, cheap SSD's?
Furthermore, code is written poorly nowadays too, tragic stuff :/ - griz, on 07/02/2008, -0/+4What about a 1000 core system sitting in an office just waiting to chew on a problem that any number of smaller systems hand off to it? Centralized computing isn't new, but having 1000 cores to deal with hundreds of user inquiries would be mighty fine.
- Culyt, on 07/02/2008, -0/+4I can imagine 'cat /proc/cpinfo' will take a while.
Or the number of cpu entries you will find in ControlPanel>System>Hardware under windows. - Pixelpaws, on 07/02/2008, -0/+4Weren't people saying that about the cost of quad-cores not long ago?
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