A 2nd Core to Keep Windows Chugging Along?

Eh-Wire writes "Almost every hardware junkie I know would give most anything to take a spin in the new dual core hot rods from Dell or one of the custom system builders. But what if you actually needed that second core to run your anti-virus, spyware detection software and firewall just to get a little gaming or Internet surfing done on the first core. Would that really be a good reason to bring home a shiny new machine? I can think of a couple of different things I could use a second core for but running an iron lung on it just to keep the machine chugging along just isn't one of them. Curiously enough, PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason."

Yeah...

More power just gives developers an excuse to use more resources. There is no reason a word processing program should lag on a 2+ ghz processor... but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does...

Re:Yeah...

but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does...

...said the person whose website is (nearly) all in flash...

Re:Yeah...

lol... The parent's website consumed 100% of my CPU resources (AMD K6-2 @ 500 MHz) for more than 6 seconds... With nothing else running besides IceWM and Firefox. Granted it was flash, but hell, my browser had to load the required libraries to load his/her website, much like a WP loads libraries. Oh, and Open Office actually loads faster (~4 secs). So who is wasting resources?

Re:Yeah...

lol... The parent's website consumed 100% of my CPU resources

That's funny. I have a dual processor machine and the one thing I love about them is related to what you said: a misbehaving app that consumes 100% CPU does not make the machine unusable, because the UI can run on the other (which I promptly use to send a SIGKILL). You do not also feel those 100% bursts that some apps do.

Sure, if a two threaded app does that, you're screwed. Then again, an app that misbehaves like that will probably be erased ASAP (programmers that do that should be ahot).

All in all, dual processors (and dual cores I guess) make very "smooth" machines.

Re:Yeah...

You've lost those 6 seconds forever... ah, you would have just wasted them anyway...

You're right! And I wasted another 5 seconds reading your meaningless reply, and yet another 20 seconds writing this meaningless reply, in response to your meaningless reply (which clearly took you several minutes to come up with)! ! When will it all end?!?!

Re:Yeah...

User: "So, uh, why did you decide to make a word processor that uses 80 megs of RAM and bogs down anything less than a 2 GHz machine?"
Programmer: "Why? Why? Muahahha.... BECAUSE I CAN."

Using more resources than necessary to complete a task doesn't demonstrate any sort of talent.

Re:Yeah...

Ah yes, words of wisdom!

You should optimize the time of your optimization so that you optimize the effects of that optimization. Optimizing at an inopportune opportunity will result in an unoptimized optimization. Just remember to use your optimization optimizer to find the best opportunity to optimize!

It's trivial, really. Hierarchial optimization is like SO basic. Don't forget to optimize your optimization optimizer! There's nothing more embarrassing than missing the optimum opportunity to optimize your code because your optimization optimizer took too long to execute!

Re:Yeah...

My experience is that it's less to do with how computer literate you are and more to do with how tasteful you are. If you think McDonald's decor is fun then you'd probably like Flash. If you think Radio Shack is the bomb then you'd probably like a plain website with no images or CSS or anything.. just paragraph aftyer paragraph of raw unadorned text. The rest of us like a few functional images and some CSS on a website that is actually functional and easy to navigate. :)

Re:Yeah...

site using flash gives (sometimes) more value

I keep hearing that. I wish I'd see an example...

You can't compare a flash site and a word processor in that manner.

Oh, I can and I will. Both are using substantial amounts of processing power to accomplish very little (or nothing) that wasn't doable with the older technologies.

Re:Yeah...

The same number of miles as my your horse. Except your horse is wearing a dress, and a hat, and clogs. And sometimes you have to feed it more hay because the clogs are icky.
For all the claims of "Techno luddite" he isn't talking about that scale. If word processors want to add AI to do predictive work (markov chain type prediction ala itap) that is FINE with me, but enough with the translucent flyaways -- it isn't so terrible to have them, but allow us to disable them.

The problem is not when I fire up word/ooo/staroffice, the problem is when I fire them up when I have 123123 other things running -- if they ran like they were on a 300 mhz celeron [i.e. conservative with resources] the system wouldn't bog down when I'm trying to add a note to some documentation.

Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat?

Well, I write all kinds of documentation, and I find that with emacs and LaTeX, I can do that on much slower processors than 350 MHz PIIs, and with a lot less memory than any WYSIWYG word processor you can point to would require. Not only that, but I become much more productive because of the more streamlined interfaces of emacs vs. any GUI-driven application, and because of the more complete capabilities of LaTeX vs. OpenOffice Writer/Microsoft Word.

As for spreadsheets, I see them more as a rapid prototyping tool (if even that). When I want to get anything done that involves large lists of data, I write a Perl script to do the job. Mind you, Perl is a lot more powerful than spreadsheet programs, and it, too, takes a lot less system resources than any given contemporary spreadsheet program.

Of course, every (wo)man has his/her own preferences, and I don't write this to encourage everyone to use emacs/LaTeX/perl, but rather to spread the fact that you don't need even a 350 MHz PII or even 64 MBs of RAM to be productive, and that it is most certainly program design that makes Open/Microsoft Office take much more resources than really necessary. While you may not need a 2 GHz machine like the GP said, you do certainly need a lot more because of the fancy GUIs and stuff.

Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat?

He probably has 25+ pieces of unnessesary crap running at startup.

Why does every coder that writes a Windows app think it has to run at sartup?

The only things that should ever run at startup, in the background, are: AV, mobo, video, sound, and anti spyware. Anything else is a waste of resources.

Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat?

maybe it's just me, but I like having gaim start up when I login.

Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat?

"Yes, it's "buried", but it's buried in a logical place if you're familiar with Office products."

I think it's also worth mentioning that one DOES need to learn to use software. It's really strange that people think the computer should know exactly what they need, display it on the screen, and nothing else.

And when they want to change something, they shouldn't need to learn to do it.

What happened there? Everything in life takes some learning, and software is certainly no exception.

Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat?

I think it's also worth mentioning that one DOES need to learn to use software. It's really strange that people think the computer should know exactly what they need, display it on the screen, and nothing else.

As far as I can tell, it's a problem that was created from both sides. Users are always lazy (for anything and everything -- for instance, if you didn't have to pass a test to get a driver's license, nobody would ever take driving lessons and learn how to drive properly), but the industry is just as much to blame for humoring such beliefs. For example, this menu-hiding functionality was spawned directly from the belief that, "The user shouldn't need to learn how to use the software." Menu items that a user never uses, or uses rarely, will get hidden in an attempt to simplify the interface (hide functionality from users that don't use that functionality). Of course, it then pisses off the user the one or two times they do need to use that hidden functionality. I wonder how often this causes a user to believe that the software can't do what they want (when it really can, but the option is hidden), so they switch to a different application? Probably not a big problem with Word or Excel, but if TurboTax hid the option to itemize how many people do you think would switch over to TaxCut? (obligatory tax-related example, given the time of year)

In my opinion, this mind set needs to change. If you don't know how to work on your car, and you don't want to learn, then you go pay a mechanic to do it for you. The same thing should apply to softare. If you don't know how to user Word and you don't want to learn, you should be able to pay someone to do what you need. If you're too cheap to pay, then you'd better be willing to learn.

On a related topic, we geeks need to stop doing free tech support for friends and family simply because we're the people they know who "know computers". If you must help your friends and family with their computer problems, charge them money. Even better, you should refuse to help unless they've exhausted all their options. Otherwise, they'll never learn and just keep coming back every time they get a popup window they don't understand. It's the age old, "Teach a man to fish," problem.

Spyware

Yeah, Windows users need the second core to run all that spyware. It'll probably help a lot!

come on...

The example of being able to play games smoothly with anti-virus scanning in the background was just that... an EXAMPLE of a situation where a dual core system might excel. The author mentions a ton of others, like encoding tv input in the background. I think it's rather sensational to say that the author thinks that's the only use or the primary use. The story submitter really needs to get a grip. The article was just trying to make the point that general responsiveness of a dual core system in the face of multiple tasks should be better, and I don't think anyone would disagree with that.

...what?

Seriously, what in the world is this article about?

Amazing revelation: dual core processors can do two things at the same time?! You must be kidding me. Any properly threaded application can take advantage of dual cores--there's no need to dream up scenarios where someone could be *gasp* doing multiple things at once.

I don't mean to sound harsh, but I'm confused as to why this is newsworthy.

Re:...what?

They can do 2 things at a time, but they are still going to the same computer components... Running a game alongside your AV scan STILL isn't going to work, because your AV software is still using the same system bus to go to the same IDE cable to go to the same harddrive. Just because your processors is duplicated, doesn't mean the rest of your system is.

Dead homies

One Core for me and one Core for all my dead homies.

Hits the nail on the head

Actually, I think the PC mag article hits the nail right on the head. The point of of a dual core machine is to run simulanious processes that need to execute side by side.

Now, we all know that most of our processes are input bound, not compute bound. They spend the vast majority of their time waiting for user input. Game are an exception: they both continually process changing data and wait for user input (that's why they are such good benchmarks). Most everything else, however, is input bound. However, many of the processes that run in the background are compute bound, input has little effect on them.

Now in my mind the best way to use a second core is to a) lump all your input bound processes on one core, and your background compute bound processes on the other (like anti-virus, firewall, maybe music, etc.) or b) run compute bound processes on each at the same time (game on one, factor large prime numbers on the other). Either way, there is almost no point in placing seperating the input bound processes between the two cores. This means that unless you are clever about how you divide the work, you aren't going to get much out of it.

Way of the future?

A lot of the systems folks that I've been hearing from and things that I've been reading have suggested that, like it or not, multi-core systems are the way of the future. The argument is that the clock-speed aspect of Moore's law has been slowing down for the past couple of years and that we've seen single processors that are as fast as they'll go with current chip design and fabrication technology. (Barring fundamental breakthroughs, of course.) Hence parallelism and multi-core systems.

I think the point is that it's not really a choice between clock speed and parallelism. You may still have a choice at the moment, but don't expect that to continue. Developers will have to start learning to deal with parallelism if they don't want to fall off the performance curve. I expect we'll start seeing methods, tools, languages and libraries to help developers manage it easily while avoid the common dangers of deadlock and inconsistency. There's some interesting research in the area and we may start seeing some of that find its way into production systems. And of course once developers start adopting parallelism, consumers will in turn begin to see the benefits of it.

In some ways its an obvious message if you look at supercomputers. No one's running serial code on petahertz machines! They're all just systems with large numbers of fairly pedestrian processors with custom fast, low-latency interconnects. As always, this is just the natural trickling down of that to the desktop level.

Re:Best protection against random internet assault

>> Or get a router

You can buy a router, and it is a really good idea, but most users will still click "yes" on whatever dialogue pops up on the screen. Your average user doesn't know what a "binary" is...

It might I think if you did devote a second core purely to spyware/virus/babysitting it would only reduce the problem but not remove it.

smarter PC usage is the answer, not more hardware...

Re:Oh it's all going to hell...

Funny you should say that on today of all days. I spent a big chunk of the afternoon finalizing some of the documentation for launchd.

The traditional UNIX startup model calls for a lot of tasks to be fired off at boot time, one after the other. Whether you use init scripts or rc scripts or whatever, the model is the same.

In Panther, we created a fairly sophisticated system for firing off these tasks in parallel instead of serially. The net result was a decrease in cold-start times of about 100%.

Now we've got launchd. The idea now is that instead of making the user wait for a bunch of services to start, we let launchd fire them both in parallel and asynchronously.

I don't want to get extremely specific here for reasons I hope are obvious, but on modern (i.e., dual-G5) hardware, the time from the end of power-on tests and the initialization of Open Firmware to the menu bar and dock appearing and the system accepting user input is as little as four seconds.

Four seconds to cold-boot the operating system.

Pretty impressive, no? All it takes is a willingness to look at the traditional way of doing things, recognize massive stupidity, and correct it.

Re:people make jokes about it but

The 244 watts figure is the power consumption of the entire system, not the chip itself.