Forget Quad Core - I want one of these!

[Ridesy]

Quad or Oct cores - pah, what you want is one of these!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6354225.stm

Wonder when they'll hit the streets

 

[jgigz]

In the article that anandtech did, it said that they wont be up for retail

 

[Aluvus]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070212-8824.html

 

[NanoStuff]

Back in my days we had 640k of RAM and one core the size of a fist that could return the square root of 200 in only 5 minutes. You spoiled kids and your 80 cores, space invaders never needed more than 1 core, what a waste, ptuh.

 

[Ridesy]

Wow, I can just about remember the glow of moving from a 386 to a 486SX and then 486DX, but don't ask me how much RAM they had!

I do however remember with glee doing an install of Windows 3.1 with what seemed like dozens of floppy discs!

I also still have an original P60 Pentium chip that is now in a box frame on my study wall, oh the days of the original Pentium!

Ridesy

 

[Munky]

Unless the apps I use will be spawining 80 threads, I don't want one of these.

 

[HeartView]

Originally posted by: munky
Unless the apps I use will be spawining 80 threads, I don't want one of these.

Not even if it cost the same as a quad core and used less energy?

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: HeartView

Originally posted by: munky
Unless the apps I use will be spawining 80 threads, I don't want one of these.

Not even if it cost the same as a quad core and used less energy?

If it gives up any performance in singlethreaded apps, then definitely not.

 

[HeartView]

Originally posted by: munky
If it gives up any performance in singlethreaded apps, then definitely not.

For the most part, single threaded apps are on their way out. Over the next few years you will find nearly everything going multi-threaded where it makes sense, games especially. So I guess I'm questioning your reasoning behind the need to run single threaded apps at maximum speed. Or were you just referring to the here and now?

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: HeartView

Originally posted by: munky
If it gives up any performance in singlethreaded apps, then definitely not.

For the most part, single threaded apps are on their way out. Over the next few years you will find nearly everything going multi-threaded where it makes sense, games especially. So I guess I'm questioning your reasoning behind the need to run single threaded apps at maximum speed. Or were you just referring to the here and now?

I believe he meant he does not have a time machine.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: HeartView

Originally posted by: munky
If it gives up any performance in singlethreaded apps, then definitely not.

For the most part, single threaded apps are on their way out. Over the next few years you will find nearly everything going multi-threaded where it makes sense, games especially. So I guess I'm questioning your reasoning behind the need to run single threaded apps at maximum speed. Or were you just referring to the here and now?

"Going multithreaded" has almost no impact on the need for greater single-threaded performance. There is a very easily approached limit where redesigning your algorithm/ program to work with more threads/cores will give little to no performance increase. Please look at Amdahl's law to get a better idea of this. Even if you had code which was 90% parralelizable, you still start to get rapidly diminishing returns at around 4-8 processors.

In the future, programmers will be able to take advantage of more cores by finding new taks for them do, I.E. give every enemy in your shooter it's own AI thread/core. This will take a lot of work for the programmer and there is still only so many tasks you can come up with to spin off to another core. More importantly, this will not help make your game any faster. You still need improved single-threaded performance for that.

 

[HeartView]

Originally posted by: aka1nas
More importantly, this will not help make your game any faster. You still need improved single-threaded performance for that.

As a programmer I will respectfully disagree with this. As they add more realism to games there is plenty of room for growth of more parallelism. In a first person shooter, for instance, you could have background threads dealing with distant enemies that are closing in or have more complicated AI that behaves like a chess game and plans several moves ahead. Or maybe your 3D scenes become so complicated that you have one thread drawing the next frame while the current one is being displayed.

Point is that "single thread performance" will be mostly irrelevant as games get more complex because everything will not be crammed into a single thread anymore, so the "main" thread will have a lot more room to do things in. Does that make sense?

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: HeartView

Originally posted by: aka1nas
More importantly, this will not help make your game any faster. You still need improved single-threaded performance for that.

As a programmer I will respectfully disagree with this. As they add more realism to games there is plenty of room for growth of more parallelism. In a first person shooter, for instance, you could have background threads dealing with distant enemies that are closing in or have more complicated AI that behaves like a chess game and plans several moves ahead. Or maybe your 3D scenes become so complicated that you have one thread drawing the next frame while the current one is being displayed.

Point is that "single thread performance" will be mostly irrelevant as games get more complex because everything will not be crammed into a single thread anymore, so the "main" thread will have a lot more room to do things in. Does that make sense?

As another programmer, I'm going to respectfully disagree with your disagreement.
To continue to generate more and more parallelism, you will have to create more work to spin off to new threads. This doesn't get your game to process faster, it just means more work overall done is getting per unit of time. Moreover, there will always be a lot of sequential dependencies in a game that will hugely limit the amount of parallelism that be be achieved. Remember, nearly every type of game works like one huge and complicated State Machine. You can't process every state at the same time because there will always be serial dependencies.

That's not to say that multi-threaded games aren't going to have a huge impact. There is a ton of potential for added realism and depth as programmers think of new tasks to utilize all these extra cores we're soon going to have sitting around. Single-threaded performance is always going to important, however.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: aka1nas
As another programmer, I'm going to respectfully disagree with your disagreement.
To continue to generate more and more parallelism, you will have to create more work to spin off to new threads. This doesn't get your game to process faster, it just means more work overall done is getting per unit of time. Moreover, there will always be a lot of sequential dependencies in a game that will hugely limit the amount of parallelism that be be achieved. Remember, nearly every type of game works like one huge and complicated State Machine. You can't process every state at the same time because there will always be serial dependencies.

That's not to say that multi-threaded games aren't going to have a huge impact. There is a ton of potential for added realism and depth as programmers think of new tasks to utilize all these extra cores we're soon going to have sitting around. Single-threaded performance is always going to important, however.

Well said!

One possible subject to look at - emulation. Current emulators are hardly parallellizable. I've come up with some algorithms myself that might allow them to be able to actually gain speed from multi-cores, but it would be taking a slight speed hit in the single-core case, and more cores will only take you so far. A faster single-core CPU is almost always preferable.

 

[Rommel44]

I dont care about 100 cores all you need is quantum computer.