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Why only 2 cores ? Why not 4 ?

CuriousMike

CuriousMike

Diamond Member
Why not 8 ?

How many applications do you have open at once ?

It'd be cool to let F@H, AntiSpyware, Anti-Virus, and the little Volume control each exist on their own core, so as to not disturb me while I'm surfing the web on another core, using WinAmp on another core, and downloading stuff on another core.

Is 2 a magic number ?

Realistically, I would suppose they've stopped at 2 cores for this generation for die-size/heat/power/etc. What about xbox360/ps3 with their multiple cores.

I want more cores.

And I want a faster hard drive.... was it gigabyte who had a newer version of a hardware ram drive shown on AT a few months ago ? Slap 16gigs of ram on it for a seriously fast harddrive. That's what I want. And about 8 cores.
 
Most of those applications you listed use up very little processing time. That would be a complete waste for even dual cores, let alone 8 cores.

Each program does not need its own processor, that is very inefficient. Todays processors already handle over 200 applications at once without many problems. If you had listed heavy programs, like encoding, gaming, 3D rendering, that would make more sense. But then again do you really need to encode 8 or 16 things at once while playing a game?

Truth is, you won't find more than 2 cores on a processor today unless the cores themselves are worse (like the individual cores of the XBOX 360 and PS3), the reason being, we're only at 90nm or 65nm. Heat is a major factor, current Intel chips throttle out of the box at stock speeds in some cases, adding more cores would compound the problem - unless you made the cores weaker. Truth is, most people can't fully utilize dual cores as of yet, and those that can get a 4 or 8 way Opteron system.

We need to technologically improve our manufacturing processes before adding more cores.
 
LOL... obviously you don't need a core to run the volume taskbar item.

But what if I want to encode 4 movies at the same time ? ( ignoring harddrive issues. )

What are processors going to be like in 10, 20, 100 years ?

More cores ? More efficient instruction sets ? Better compilers ? 900 gigahertz ?
 
Originally posted by: Continuity28
Most of those applications you listed use up very little processing time. That would be a complete waste for even dual cores, let alone 8 cores.

Each program does not need its own processor, that is very inefficient. Todays processors already handle over 200 applications at once without many problems. If you had listed heavy programs, like encoding, gaming, 3D rendering, that would make more sense. But then again do you really need to encode 8 or 16 things at once while playing a game?

Truth is, you won't find more than 2 cores on a processor today unless the cores themselves are worse (like the individual cores of the XBOX 360 and PS3), the reason being, we're only at 90nm or 65nm. Heat is a major factor, current Intel chips throttle out of the box at stock speeds in some cases, adding more cores would compound the problem - unless you made the cores weaker. Truth is, most people can't fully utilize dual cores as of yet, and those that can get a 4 or 8 way Opteron system.

We need to technologically improve our manufacturing processes before adding more cores.
Click to expand...

CPU Magazine stated that by 2020, fabrication processes will produce CPU's that will equal that of a hot plate, and by time in the future yet to come, equal that of a spec on our galaxy's star. Even now heating is becoming a concern, as computer manufacturers are quite aware that faster computers will require intense cooling.
There will be a point in time where there will be a standard laptop computer that can handle any mainstream applications for a very low price. Considerably ten years from now, and just think of its cooling?
 
Originally posted by: CuriousMike
LOL... obviously you don't need a core to run the volume taskbar item.

But what if I want to encode 4 movies at the same time ? ( ignoring harddrive issues. )
Click to expand...

Do you think there's a huge market for this considering the cost?

What are processors going to be like in 10, 20, 100 years ?
Click to expand...
Quantum processors

More cores ? More efficient instruction sets ? Better compilers ? 900 gigahertz ?
Click to expand...

at start, then they'll move to technology that isn't inevnted yet
 
IBM already produces high end procs with quad core in their p-Series servers. (RISC based - Power PC..) they consistantly set benchmark records in theie targeting application base on those apps, not synthetic benchmarks......

They offer p-Series workstations as well.
 
Originally posted by: WackyDan
IBM already produces high end procs with quad core in their p-Series servers. (RISC based - Power PC..) they consistantly set benchmark records in theie targeting application base on those apps, not synthetic benchmarks......

They offer p-Series workstations as well.
Click to expand...

Ofcourse, this wouldn't be very affordable for a mainstream quadcore desktop I suppose (compared to today's dualcore prices). It must be close to an extremely high end workstation, maybe as close to a super computer, or absolutely being one itself.
 
It's all a question of time. Right now, the hardware companies are making the break to dual core. This will (pretty much) force apps, OS, and drivers to be rewritten at multithreaded, thread safe apps or componenets. Once the software is in place, the on going advances in manufacturing technology will allow them to release 4 core, 8 core, 12 core, who knows how many cores...

There are already plans for a different variation of the multicore CPU that basically uses one truely general purpose CPU (very similar to todays single core CPUs) that also has a large number of simplier, faster mini cores for running threads. That should be very interesting when it hits.

One thing to keep in mind is that the modern single core CPU already has a lot of parallelism built in. They have multiple excecution units already, but the CPU was required to keep track of the code path and execute microcode in the correct order to keep everything lined up. When all the apps and OSs are properly threaded from the beginning, a lot of that extra "junk" can be removed from a multicore CPU and you end up with a much smaller die area per core than would normally be the case and each core can run faster with less power than the single core of old. Tied in with a bunch of cores on each die, it is going to be VERY interesting!

Now if they would just get off their butts and figure out how to dope diamond films. Then the fun could REALLY begin!
 
Originally posted by: Snooper

There are already plans for a different variation of the multicore CPU that basically uses one truely general purpose CPU (very similar to todays single core CPUs) that also has a large number of simplier, faster mini cores for running threads. That should be very interesting when it hits.
Click to expand...

Sounds kinda like the cell processor in the PS3.

link

Or are you talking about the future processors described by intel?

link
 
It's not that it's too hard... it's just expensive. Since we can't shrink the manufacturing process overnight, they'd have to be made on the 90nm process... so with quad cores they'd get half as many units per wafer as they do now with dual cores. Actually less than that, cause if one of the cores turns out bad, the whole thing can't be sold... unless they could chop them up and make some single cores and some dual cores out of the quad cores that don't all work.

The more units per wafer they can sell, the larger profit they can make. They can't really charger the customer per mm² of die space. If they can get 100 units out of a single wafer at 90nm and they make $50 per unit, that's $5000 profit per wafer. Then they shrink the manufacturing process to 65nm, they might get 130 units and still make $50 per unit... now they make $6500 per wafer. Or... take a $38 profit per unit and pass the savings along to the customer while still making their $5000 per wafer.

Now if they couldn't shrink the process to 65nm yet, and they switched to dual cores and only got 50 units per wafer, at a $50 profit per unit, that's only $2500 per wafer. They'd have to take $100 per unit to maintain their profit of $5000 per wafer... that's not going to happen. So imagine they shrink to 65nm and are making dual cores... they'd have to make $77 per dual core unit to maintain their $5000 profit per wafer, or take $50 per unit and only make $3250 per wafer.

Factor in the billions of dollars required for R&D for new architectures and retooling to switch to a smaller manufacturing process and it's easy to see that they can't afford to take make only 50-65% of what they've previously been running on.
 
Jeff7181,

I think you are going to find that WHEN most apps/OS are multithreaded, we WILL see high core count CPUs. The big difference is that most of the cores are going to be very simple cores (single integer unit, single FPU if at all, no out of order excecution hardware, etc.) which makes them VERY small and very high frequency. This will allow the CPU to take threads in and spit threads out VERY quickly.

The high core count CPUs of the future are not going to be just a bunch of the current single core CPUs shrunk down and stuck on a single die. There has been a LOT of work done and a LOT of extra hardware added to current single core CPUs to allow them to internally multitask. I'm not just talking about Hyperthreading (although, that is one item!), but things like multiple execute units, out of order processing (and all the silicon space required to figure out the correct order to run things and then put them back in order before returning the results to the application), very, very advanced branch prediction (why have branch prediction if you can just have two simple cores calculate BOTH branchs at the same time then take the right one at the end?), etc. There is just so much "junk" built into a moden single core CPU that really isn't necessary (or even helpful) when you start talking about high core count CPUs with properly multithreaded applicaitons.
 
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