Intel Details Upcoming Gulftown Six-Core Processor 219
MojoKid writes "With the International Solid-State Circuits Conference less than a week away, Intel has released additional details on its upcoming hexa-core desktop CPU, next gen mobile, and dual-core Westmere processors. Much of the dual-core data was revealed last month when Intel unveiled their Clarkdale architecture. However, when Intel set its internal goals for what its calling Westmere 6C, the company aimed to boost both core and cache count by 50 percent without increasing the processor's thermal envelope. Westmere 6C (codename Gulftown) is a native six-core chip. Intel has crammed 1.17 billion transistors into a die that's approximately 240mm sq. The new chip carries 12MB up L3 (up from Nehalem's 8MB) and a TDP of 130W at 3.33GHz. In addition, Intel has built in AES encryption instruction decode support as well as a number of improvements to Gulftown's power consumption, especially in idle sleep states."
Grand Central Dispatch (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps a jump in number of cores will convince people outside the Apple and FreeBSD camps to port Grand Central Dispatch.
Letting the kernel team handle the hairier parts of multi-threaded design should make it easy for barely-optimized software to use powerful hardware.
Could its Apache license work with the #1 OS family?
Re:Grand Central Dispatch (Score:5, Informative)
Porting libdispatch requires a generic event delivery framework, where the userspace process can wait for a variety of different types of event (signals, I/O, timers). On Darwin, Apple used the kqueue() mechanism that was ported from FreeBSD, so it's quite easy to port the code to FreeBSD (just #ifdef the bits that deal with Mach messages appearing on the queue). Kqueue is also ported to NetBSD and OpenBSD, so porting it to these systems will be easy too.
Solaris and Windows both have completion ports, which provide the same functionality but with different interfaces. Porting to Solaris would require replacing the kqueue stuff with completion port stuff. Porting to Windows would ideally also require replacing the pthread stuff with win32 thread calls. Even Symbian has a nice event delivery framework that could be used, although I'm not sure what the pthread implementation is like in the Symbian POSIX layer.
Linux is the odd system out. All different types of kernel events are delivered to userspace via different mechanisms, so it's really hairy trying to block waiting until the next kernel event. This also makes it harder to write low-power Linux apps, because your app can't spend so long sleeping and so the kernel can't spend so much time with the CPU in standby mode.
If you don't need the event input stuff (which, to be honest, you do; it's really nice), you can use toydispatch, which is a reimplementation that I wrote of the core workqueue model using just portable pthread stuff.
It also adds some pthread extensions for determining the optimal number of threads per workqueue (or workqueues per thread, depending on the number of cores and the load), but these are not required. The FreeBSD 8.0 port doesn't have them; they were added with FreeBSD 8.1.
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Can you provide a link for this? A Google search for "linux toydispatch" yields 3 hits, one of which is your post above:
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Subversion repository [gna.org]. Note that it's designed specifically to do stuff in the background for libobjc2. It only implements a tiny subset of the libdispatch functionality, and not as efficiently (one thread per workqueue, for example). It's not intended to replace libdispatch, just to let me use some of the libdispatch APIs in code that has to be portable. The 'toy' in the name is not self-deprecation, it's an accurate assessment.
Oh, and you get better results if you search for 'toydispatch' not 'lin
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Actually that isn't the case, I've been keeping an eye on the porting of GCD to other OSs and there are build options for with and without blocks (the non-standard C extension).
As of right now I think the status is that FreeBSD (and other BSDs) can compile GCD with or without block support, Solaris is 90% there (again with and without blocks), and Linux is about 70% there (can compile and parts work, but not all of it).
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Funny enough, it was around the time that really, really multi-cored machines started showing up, so they wrote an open source library to make it easier for people and said "have at it".
If "marketing magic" is writing a webpage on their main site with some nice graphics and a description of how it works, then no wonder Linux is struggling for Desktop acceptance. I would just cal that "making a nice webpage". It's not sorcery. "Marketing? Do we need to compile that?" /tongue in cheek.
240mm square? (Score:2)
1.17 billion transistors into a die that's approximately 240mm sq
That's a big chip.
Re:240mm square? (Score:4, Insightful)
1.17 billion transistors into a die that's approximately 240mm sq
That's a big chip.
240 mm sq, that's 15.49mm x 15.49mm
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240 mm sq, that's 15.49mm x 15.49mm
But not nearly as amusing. ;-)
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Isn't it 240mm sq = 240mm x 240mm (as in (240mm) squared) and 240 sq mm is 240 x 1mm x 1mm (as in 240 x (square mms))? It's always an awkward one to represent and be clear on.
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that'd be how I read it, and I'm pretty sure how the GGP read it, too... 240 mm sq = 240mm squared, which is different from 240 square millimeters.
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No.
1sq mm is a square with 1mm sides
240sq mm is 240 of them.
The side is sqrt 240 for a square shape.
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That's because the actual unit is mm^2, which people pronounce millimeter squared, instead of square millimeter.
So, 240 mm^2 is 15.49 mm * 15.49 mm
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But the original was "mm sqr" (millimetres square) rather than "mm sqrd" (millimetres squared).
I still thought that "mm^2" was "square millimetres", though, as in "tin of paint covers nine square metres" = "covers nine x 1m x 1m" = "covers 9m^2".
All so confusing, and so very liable to getting things completely wrong by huge orders of magnitude!
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And how much is that in football fields?
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What? Why?
In every other case I can think of where you need to denote area it's opposite.
240 mm sq is 240 millimeters each side for a total area of 240mm x 2, or 57,600 square millimeters.
If you want to refer directly to the area then the unit descriptor comes AFTER the square designator, like this: 240 square millimeters.
You wouldn't write " 42 feet square" when you meant "42 square feet" would you?
Did I miss something somewhere?
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The correct notation for an area of 240 square millimeters is very hard to type (it's 240mm^2), my guess is the OP just turned "^2" into "sq" (for "squared") leading to the confusion.
They are supposed to ship in March (Score:2)
Talked to our HP rep a few weeks ago about them. As soon as HP ships proliant servers with the new CPU's, we're going to buy 4 of them. Just haven't decided if we're going with 36GB RAM or 72GB RAM. 72GB RAM is only $2000 more than 36GB RAM these days.
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I'm guessing that 36GB and 72GB refer to three dimms per channel times 6 channels (three per processor) and 2GB or 4GB modules. IIRC with DDR3 if you put three dimms on a channel you are limited to DDR3-800 speeds.
the best fucking CPU that ever existed (Score:3, Funny)
Just so you know, I made this joke almost two years ago:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=465898&cid=22548916 [slashdot.org]
They could have gone to 3 cores, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do, but they said "Fuck it, we're going to six". What part of this don't you understand? If two cores is good, and four cores is better, obviously six cores would make them the best fucking CPU that ever existed.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930 [theonion.com] [theonion.com]
/I'm just waiting for the day Intel says "this one goes to 11"
It's the CPU joke that will never die.
Intel announces 6 cores, 6 months after AMD.. yawn (Score:3, Interesting)
So I skimmed TFA (gasp!) and it appears that Intel is finally following AMDs lead by keeping thermal envelopes constant.
I note that this is still a effectively 2 CPUs with 3 cores each, but that's better than legacy Intel approaches, which would have been 3 sets of dual cores.
It will be interesting to see how independent performance benchmarks play out between the new processors that are coming out.
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I'm pretty sure it is one die, with communication possible between any cores. It just looks like 2x3 due to the way it is laid out.
Obligatory (Score:2, Insightful)
Transistor count (Score:2)
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... 68K transistors was a LOT in 1980 and made for a fantastic 32bit architecture....
I'm guessing you're still caffeine deprived, and meant 8 bit architecture.
Anyway, what I want to know is where are the 3.2GHz 6502 and Z80's? You'd think making an existing architecture run like a bat out of hell would be far easier than a new Pentium chip. With less than 1.17 billion transistors, you could put an entire C64 or Apple II on one chip and run all the old software.
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The Motorola 68000 was/is a 32-bit architecture.
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I have a feeling that Loderunner would be difficult to play at 3.2 GHz.
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And yet, latest ARM cores are much closer to that 68k transistors from 1980, while not being nearly that far behind i7 in performance as the relation between numbers of transistors would suggest.
Perhaps ARM found the sweet spot.
To much cores, to little use... (Score:2, Interesting)
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1/2-word?
I'm pretty sure that there are instructions for atomic compare and swap of pointer-sized values, at least.
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Isn't the xchg instruction atomic for all sizes (8/16/32/64 bits)?
on-board AES? (Score:2)
Why put AES on-board? I thought AES was relatively fast as encryption algorithms go. Plus, it is inevitable that AES will be replaced at some point, so why include something so specific in a chip now? It will suck to have to implement that in the processor in 20 years when nobody uses AES any longer. This is the whole point of a processor - include generic instructions that are useful for implementing any algorithm.
Re:on-board AES? (Score:5, Informative)
Why put AES on-board?
They're not: they're putting extra instructions on-board which help implement AES more efficiently. They may also allow you to implement other algorithms more efficiently, though I haven't looked at them in enough detail to be sure.
I thought AES was relatively fast as encryption algorithms go.
That still doesn't make it fast at an absolute level. Particularly when you're doing full-disk encryption with user account encryption on top and IPSEC on all your network connections.
Re:on-board AES? (Score:4, Informative)
Why put AES on-board?
They're not: they're putting extra instructions on-board which help implement AES more efficiently. They may also allow you to implement other algorithms more efficiently, though I haven't looked at them in enough detail to be sure.
The instructions perform a single round of AES (which has 10-14 rounds depending on key size), either encrypting or decrypting. Certain other algorithms such as Lex, Camellia, Fugue and Grostl use AES S-boxes in their core, and can probably benefit from these instructions. However, they will not achieve nearly so much a speedup as AES.
The AES instructions themselves will approximately double the speed of sequential AES computations. This is very unimpressive; VIA's AES instructions are much faster. They will also make it resistant to cache-timing attacks without losing speed, which is unimpressive because you can already do this on Penryn and Nehalem. The low speed results from the AES instructions having latency 6; if you can use a parallel mode (GCM, OCB, PMAC, or CBC-decrypt, for example) then the performance should be 10-12x the fastest current libraries. Hopefully, this will cause people to stop using CBC mode, but perhaps I'm too optimistic.
Intel also added an instruction called PCLMULQDQ which does polynomial multiplication over F_2. If it's fast (I can't find timing numbers, but hopefully it's something like latency 2 and throughput 1) then it will be very useful for cryptography in general, speeding up certain operations by an order of magnitude or more. This is more exciting to me than the AES stuff, because it might enable faster, simpler elliptic-curve crypto and similarly simpler message authentication codes. Unfortunately, these operations are still slow on other processors, so cryptographers will be hesitant to use them until similar instructions become standard. If the guy you're communicating with has to do 10x the work so that you can do half the work... well, I guess it's still a win if you're the server.
I thought AES was relatively fast as encryption algorithms go.
That still doesn't make it fast at an absolute level. Particularly when you're doing full-disk encryption with user account encryption on top and IPSEC on all your network connections.
AES is fast for a block cipher, but modern stream ciphers such as Salsa20/12, Rabbit, HC and SOSEMANUK are about 3-4x faster. (In other words, they are still faster than AES in a sequential mode on Westmere.) AES is still competitive, though, if you can use OCB mode to encrypt and integrity-protect the data at the same time.
The fastest previous Intel processor with cutting-edge libraries in the most favorable mode could probably encrypt or decrypt 500MB/s/core at 3-3.5GHz. This is fast enough for most purposes, but in real life with ordinary libraries you'd probably get a third of that. So this will significantly improve disk and network encryption if they use a favorable cipher mode.
Cred: I am a cryptographer, and I wrote what is currently the fastest sequential AES library for Penryn and Nehalem processors. But the calculations above are back-of-the-envelope, so don't depend on them.
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Yeah AES is relatively fast with the keyword being relatively. Those of us who like to use disk encryption applaud this move since it would great reduce the need for seperate and expensive crypto hardware.
Codenamed codename? (Score:2, Insightful)
>Westmere 6C (codename Gulftown)
Really? I fricking hate codenamed codenames...
Who cares... (Score:2)
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Sure, but neither the Oracle or IBM chips will be available for less than several grand, and never in consumer level equipment (I can't exactly order one off Newegg.) And there's no telling how long it will be until the AMD chip trickles down from Opteron class to Phenom class, while it will probably be short order for the Core i9 to appear in stores.
I suspect that AMD will drop the 6-core version as an X6 pretty soon, but it will likely be outperformed (possibly significantly) by the Gulftown.
AMD responds... (Score:2)
with an AMD X3 Core 2 Duo or AMD X3X2...
Though I wonder why we are going to 6 rather than 8. Core 2 Quad Duo's? Head 'esplodes....
I just can't wait till the Quad Quads... or something spiffy, like Quad Squared. 16 is probably a ways off from the consumer market anyway.
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The nice thing about running Doom on a Core 2 Quad is that all weapons do four times as much damage, all the time.
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MultiTasking
Chicken or Egg (Score:2)
In the server space we've gone through the same thing. Sun introduced the T1 with 8 cores and 32 threads (now 64 on T2). Lots of software wasn't suitable for this type of horizontal scaling. But over a period of five years, that changed dramatically.
On the desktop, you can expect the same. For now, not many desktop apps will take advantage of the additional cores. But if Intel would have stuck with 1-2 cores, no software will be written to take advantage of multiple cores.
Chicken or egg ....
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Having a second core was handy for people who like to play world of warcraft in one window and surf web pages in the other (considering how much CPU modern web pages eat for some reason. yay flash?).
Having two more cores beyond that is fairly useless for the vast majority of even power users except for very specific apps that even they are running a very small percentage of the overall time they are using their computers.
Not that I particularly disagree with your conclusions overall, but wow can actually be set to run on multiple cores and does get a performance benefit for doing so.
Re:Are most programmes multi-processor? (Score:4, Insightful)
And that game, my friend, requires a quad-core CPU. Which I don't have at the moment, and even with my Intel E6550 overclocked from 2.66 to 3.6 GHz the game runs at 25-35 FPS at 1680x1050, with both cores at 100%.
I used to have the same approach (multicore is dumb) but now it's a thing of the past.
There are more and more apps and games out there who take advantage of multicore, not to mention that operating systems (such as Windows 7) are better at allocationg sepaarte cores for single-core applications to balance the load.
Therefore, while I don't dismiss the need of having a multicore CPU, in the end it's all about balancing your investment against the benefits. If you need a 6-core CPU and it doesn't cost a kidney and a lung, then get it. Regardless of your decision as a customer, there's always a good thing in this sort of advancements: new stuff pushes down prices for older stuff
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that game, my friend, requires a quad-core CPU.
Seriously? Is this an official requirement?
If so that would explain why it runs like a bag of shit on my (otherwise fairly good) PC.
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Unofficial but true. Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] has a bunch of benchmarks. The only dual core CPUs that manage 60 FPS are the i5s with hyper-threading, and they are beaten by less expensive Phenom II quad cores.
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While the 360 and ps3 versions are coded much better they're far from perfect. Cruising down a highway for a long period will get you crashed into an object that hadn't been rendered yet.
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VMware. /debate
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Examples of things that benefit from more than two cores:
- Modern web browsers such as Chrome
--- Multi-process architecture means that Flash sucks up a CPU all to itself, while various other tabs/domains are in different processes. Javascript-heavy web-apps or the user of other flash like plugins can easily make 3+ cores worthwhile
- Most modern games
--- Games are very CPU intensive. Most modern engines do a very good job of taking advantage of multiple cores. Some games even require 2+ cores in order to get
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Heck my normal workflow eats a minimum of two cores.
Re:Are most programmes multi-processor? (Score:5, Funny)
Cores are like girls in 'hot sluts gone wild' scenes - after a certain point you might hardly notice if there's even more of them, but you'd never say "no" to an increase.
Re:Are most programmes multi-processor? (Score:5, Funny)
Cores are like girls in 'hot sluts gone wild' scenes - after a certain point you might hardly notice if there's even more of them, but you'd never say "no" to an increase.
But my "operating system" can only deal with one hand- I mean core- at once!
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I think I'd prefer two strong oxen. Wait, what were we talking about?
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I'll take the milfs :) those ladies have experience
And syphilis! enjoy...
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I'll take the 19 year olds, thanks! : ) They can quickly learn to do all the MILF tricks and teaching is fun.
Plus the 19 year olds usually have more energy.
Re:Are most programmes multi-processor? (Score:4, Informative)
Can most programmes really be written to take advantage of so many cores?
Yup.
Got a Core i7-920 running at 3.2GHz at home - OS is 64-bit Kubuntu 9.10.
Yesterday I had five two-hour videos I wanted to render to DVD5 format - four were .avi and one was .mp4.
Launched five instances of DeVeDe to render the video and create the DVD file structure and did all five at the same time - then left for work. Took an hour and twelve minutes and the machine didn't melt, explode or let any of the magic smoke out of the box.
Even if an application isn't multithreaded the OS is - so even running a single task a multicore processor will give you a performance boost.
A Core i7 has four cores that'll run two threads each - presents as eight processor cores to the OS. I have no problem using them all ;-)
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So...you had to wait quite long anyway. Long enough that you decided to do something else in the meantime, because there's no way you would simply wait for the result. Long enough that the speedup offered by Core i7 in comparison to the cheapest Celeron didn't mean much, since in either case the task would be done after you returned.
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So...you had to wait quite long anyway. Long enough that you decided to do something else in the meantime, because there's no way you would simply wait for the result. Long enough that the speedup offered by Core i7 in comparison to the cheapest Celeron didn't mean much, since in either case the task would be done after you returned.
Most likely the Celeron *wouldn't* have been done when I got home from work - running the same job on my old hyperthreading 2.8GHz machine would have taken about ten hours, just going by past experience. The old P4 took about as long to render video as it did to watch it.
If I *had* been home I'd have reniced the encoding processes so that I could do day-to-day stuff while rendering the video. It'd have taken twice as long but I wouldn't have seen much of a performance hit.
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Ah, so you don't realize that the cheapest Celeron nowadays is a dualcore 2.5 GHz, essentially a Core 2 Duo with 1 MiB of L2 (irrelevant, encoder will fit and the video is a stream of data) and 800 MHz FSB (irrelevant, mostly limited by the speed of computation, not by sustained transfer of the video stream). It would be done probably in around half of the time you were at work.
If you were at home with a Celeron you could also do day-to-day stuff (yes, it would take even longer - but is that really that imp
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I think what *you* don't realize is that I run this big, bad i7 to compensate for being woefully underendowed.
But seriously, I get your drift on running unattended processes. I buy probably a thousand computers a year and generally buy what people need, not what the latest IT comic book says they need to have ;-)
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If you left for work, would it have really made any difference to you if it took five times as long?
Thought it probably wouldn't, as you could have been hard-disk bound quite easily reading five large files while writing five other large files. The seeking alone would be nasty.
Re:Are most programmes multi-processor? (Score:5, Funny)
If you left for work, would it have really made any difference to you if it took five times as long?
Well, yeah. I wouldn't have been able to brag about it ;-)
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I heard that Linus Torvalds doesn't even work on the kernel these days. He just downloads the latest source from bittorrent.
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Even if an application isn't multithreaded the OS is - so even running a single task a multicore processor will give you a performance boost.
Not quite. A single single-threaded process will not run faster on a multi-core processor (in fact it might run a little slower if the OS doesn't keep it running on the same core for the whole run, as jumping the task between cores uses L1 and L2 cache less efficiently) because the OS will not know how to try and split it up, but running multiple single-threaded tasks (i.e. your five instances of DeVeDe) will most likely benefit significantly (unless other bottlenecks such as I/O bandwidth/latency kick in).
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Not quite. A single single-threaded process will not run faster on a multi-core processor (in fact it might run a little slower if the OS doesn't keep it running on the same core for the whole run, as jumping the task between cores uses L1 and L2 cache less efficiently) because the OS will not know how to try and split it up, but running multiple single-threaded tasks (i.e. your five instances of DeVeDe) will most likely benefit significantly (unless other bottlenecks such as I/O bandwidth/latency kick in).
My point was that with the kernel and whatever services are running spread out over multiple cores there *should* be more processor resources available per core to run the single-threaded application - at least that's been my experience.
Re:Are most programmes multi-processor? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Around here, the programmers never met a thread they didn't like. Add a requirement like - "display dialog box to confirm shutdown" and suddenly the thread count in the application jumps by 4...
Could things be done more efficiently? No, because that would require thinking and thermodynamically it is cheaper just to spawn another thread.
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Around here, the programmers never met a thread they didn't like. Add a requirement like - "display dialog box to confirm shutdown" and suddenly the thread count in the application jumps by 4...
Lemme guess these programs are also buggy crash prone peices of shit?
having more than one thread doing UI stuff has always struck me as more trouble than it's worth (you need loads of extra locks and a lot of thinking about what does and doesn't constitute a consistent state). Indeed some common gui libraries (swing
Re:Are most programmes multi-processor? (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the things that you do on a computer will run happily on a 1GHz CPU and still not bring usage over 50% more than occasionally
Speak for yourself.
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In my opinion, the advantage of multi-core is not that you can make tasks parallel, but that you can run non-parallel tasks in parallel.
Yesterday I had to do some password-cracking. My fastest system was my quad-core desktop. On a single-core system, the cracking software would have made my desktop unusable. But since this was quad core, I could fire the process off and continue to use my system as usual, with no perceptible slow-down on FireFox, NetBeans, or any other app I was working with at that time.
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I don't see that as MS's fault per se.
I realize there could be some smarts built into the system that would notice the two threads IO blocking each other and put them into serial operations, but really, you would have to make the CP operation more complex and have some sort of -nice kernel flag that each program could register... All in all the complexity is not worth the improvement.
-nB
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Real time games are a bad example because in general the trouble with threads is you have to sync them up. The entire program becomes give feedback, gather input, calculate stuff, give feedback. You generally need to make sure the calculate stuff parts starts and stops with some predictability.
Some games seem to run their AI in separate threads. These seems to be a reasonable compromise. So when the game does 'gather input' it asks the AI subsection where it wants to go at that instant.
However, its jud
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Here's a tip for Windows users. Take a look at task manager, and add the "number of threads" column. You'll see that pretty much everything has more than one thread. I'm seeing 12-24 for each IE instance, 16 for Excel, 54 for Outlook, 46 for IDEA, etc. A lot of developers (particularly on slashdot) seem to have a real issue with threading, I think they much be C++ coders, as other more modern languages make multi-threading much easier and more reliable. You still have to be careful, of course, but the benef
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You're question is missing something: the Enterprise virtualization market. It's huge. It's inherently parallel. It's basically the main thing that has driven the entire multicore market for the last 3-4 years.
C//
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On server yes. Without a doubt.
On a desktop even if a certain task isn't you are probably running multiple programs in the background that can use the other cores.
Honestly programmers really need to start thinking about how to use these new CPUs.
A good example is where I work our major product does a timed backup of any open document every few minutes.
It can produce a noticeable blip now and then.
In the next version we may just make a copy of the document in RAM and then write the backup in a tread from tha
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I read recently that the new Firefox uses a separate core garbage collection.
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The cool thing about processors now is that they can dynamically allocate the total thermal envelope - and they're getting good at it. So if you only need one core, it runs at (say) 3.5GHz and the others are idle. That might scale up to all 6 processors running at 2.5GHz with a bunch of threads. The key is that the processor will perform better on a single threaded applicatino than it's cover clock speed would indicate. The i7-8xx do this now, and the results are very good in the real world, despite not be
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Can most programmes really be written to take advantage of so many cores?
No, for most programs that would be quite complicated, however most programs idle around all the time anyway, so that wouldn't be an big issue. Those programs that actually burn CPU (video de/encoding, Photoshop/Gimp filters, etc.) on the other side could for most part easily be parallelized. The issue of course is that basically all program languages we have in use make parallelization hard, so nobody is doing it unless they specifically optimize their stuff for multi-core, which in turn means that most pr
Re:Are most programmes multi-processor? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Wrong question. When was the last time my computer was running a single thread that could use 100% CPU for more than a few milliseconds. Answer: All the time. For example whenever I open Slashdot with Firefox. I rather have less cores at higher speed than more cores.
Really? So one thread wasn't reading the network traffic, one wasn't parsing the markup, and a third putting things up on the screen? At the same time the page wasn't being saved to your browser cache, while your e-mail program was querying the server for new mail, and cron was checking to see if there were jobs to run this minute? If you're on Windows, all of these activities were probably scanned by anti-virus.
There's a lot going on in a modern system:
$ ps -ef | wc -l
146
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Or on a simple Windows XP desktop: open Task Manager and add the "Threads" column. IExplorer 17 threads, System 56, some svchost.exe ranging from 15 to 70 threads. OK, many will be dormant, but I prefer them to sleep on another core. :)
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There's a lot going on in a modern system:
$ ps -ef | wc -l
146
Those are just idling process, actual CPU activity is extremely low. It doesn't really make a difference if you have 1 idle threads or 100, you don't need CPU power for those either way and multicore doesn't make idling faster. The processes that actually use CPU power on the other side are seldom broken up into multiple threads, so you quite frequently see your system at 50% usage on a multicore, with the second processor idling along.
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This is why I bought a 2 core CPU. For the power draw and upfront cost it made the most sense for my workloads.
Occasionally I encode videos for youtube and vimeo, and compile large software packages, but otherwise a 4 core CPU would be drawing power needlessly and unnecessarily expensive for me 99.9% of the time..
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
less cores at higher speed
And I want a pony.
The move to multiple cores was driven primarily by Moore's law approaching fundamental physical realities in trying to further shrink conventional CMOS transistors. I'm sure manufacturers would have loved to stay with single cores and bump up clock speed every financial quarter rather than upset the industry's technological architecture.
Solid State Physics 1, Corporate Financial Officers 0.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me rephrase this. As soon as you think virtualization and not just one OS this makes beautiful sense. There, I fixed that myself.
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Why should it matter if browsers are multi-threaded? Is your browser maxing out the one cpu it's on at the moment? I don't know about the rest of you, but if my browser is holding at 99%+ cpu usage, historically that's told me that something is -wrong-, not that I need more cpu power.
Hiding comments in a slashdot story that has more than 400 comments?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
first
looks like you need more cores
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a server processor. They did it for advanced encryption. The only way this would make more powerful DRM is if there were some sort of key embedded in the CPU (and this is not that.)
This is for encryption, which unlike DRM is actually more than security theatre (when used properly.)
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This is a server processor.
Well, the summary says "desktop CPU", while the URL of TFA says "mobile"...
Re:DRM Support (Score:5, Informative)
What?
AES acceleration will be useful for VPNs, serving SSL websites, VoIP, full disk encryption ... and so on.
Re: (Score:2)
Which is obviously the reason AMD's and VIA's CPUs had the same thing over half a decade ago, right? DRM sure was prolific back then.
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You can bet the sole reason for including this was to support DRM-protected content.
It may very well be useful for DRM, but I would venture that there are several reasons to include further AES instructions in hardware; one of the chief being full disk encryption performance.