Multicore processor question

Quote from syswizard:

Yes, most software now needs to be rewritten to support multi-core processors optimally.
In fact, Intel has just released a software kit to do just that....funny how it has come about 2 years after the hardware was introduced. Once again, software tech lags hardware tech.
http://www.intel.com/go/parallel
Of course, we all know which one is more important, right ?
More...

Hasn't Intel told us there will soon be 16-cores, then 64-cores? Wonder what THAT will cost..
 
Quote from syswizard:

Yes, most software now needs to be rewritten to support multi-core processors optimally.
In fact, Intel has just released a software kit to do just that....funny how it has come about 2 years after the hardware was introduced. Once again, software tech lags hardware tech.
http://www.intel.com/go/parallel
Of course, we all know which one is more important, right ?
More...
MSFT has a similar initiative:

http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/default.aspx

nitro
 
Quote from gnome:

Hasn't Intel told us there will soon be 16-cores, then 64-cores? Wonder what THAT will cost..
More...

What is the cost incurred in producing a chip, or a core? Certainly not the input cost of material. So does it really cost them anything more to make a 16 core chip relative to a 4 core chip?

The heavy cost is the R&D, tooling and retooling of factories, marketing, advertising, golden parachutes, etc.

They want sales; that's where they get their money. First rule of business "How much do you get for your product? Answer: As much as you can get!"

If they have 16 core processors they will start out at $1k-$2k or more for as long as they can get it but eventually will be $50 just like a Celeron 2.0GHz is today.
 
Quote from mgookin:
What is the cost incurred in producing a chip, or a core? Certainly not the input cost of material. So does it really cost them anything more to make a 16 core chip relative to a 4 core chip?
The heavy cost is the R&D, tooling and retooling of factories, marketing, advertising, golden parachutes, etc.
They want sales; that's where they get their money. First rule of business "How much do you get for your product? Answer: As much as you can get!"
If they have 16 core processors they will start out at $1k-$2k or more for as long as they can get it but eventually will be $50 just like a Celeron 2.0GHz is today.
More...

The material is immaterial.

However the manufacturing cost is not linear.

On a single core processor, if one core turns out bad, you throw away one chip.

On a quad core processor, if one core is bad, you throw away 4.

You get the picture...

AMD tried to market a 3-core chip. Analyst speculate that they had a bad batch of chips, instead of throwing them away, they can sell them as 3-core processors.

;-)
 
Bottom line : if you are not sure that you should choose quad over duo, you probably shouldn't.

Nitro: Thanks for the links, PLINQ looks very interesting.

I think in the future we will see a move away from machine-architecture-specific programming (like C and its descendants c++,java and c#), toward more abstract and declarative programming. Multithreading and synchronization will be handled automatically by compilers.
 
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