Frustrated with intel Where are the 8 core CPUs?

[Arachnotronic]

Just wait for Haswell. It will be a lot cheaper to get a quad-core Haswell with twice the throughput per core than to get a weak 8-core Sandy Bridge. It will be more power efficient and clock higher too.

That throughput won't be realized in most shipping software, though.

 

[BenchPress]

That throughput won't be realized in most shipping software, though.

Of course it will. The developers have to do little more than a recompile and provide a patch. It takes less effort than making things suitable for many cores, so they'd be mad to ignore Haswell.

 

[jhu]

Of course it will. The developers have to do little more than a recompile and provide a patch. It takes less effort than making things suitable for many cores, so they'd be mad to ignore Haswell.

Depends on how good the compiler can extract parallelism from the code (if that's even possible given the algorithm).

 

[BenchPress]

Depends on how good the compiler can extract parallelism from the code (if that's even possible given the algorithm).

Haswell's gather and vector-vector shift support makes it straightforward for the compiler to parallelize loops with independent iterations. And algorithms suited for multi-core are inherently parallel, and thus also suited for SIMD.

The only exception would be highly divergent algorithms, but those don't scale well with multiple cores either, due to synchronization and memory coherence. Fortunately that's where Haswell's lock elision and transactional memory technology will help greatly.

So no matter what, you'll want a quad-core Haswell instead of an 8-core Ivy Bridge.