Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="drothgery" data-source="post: 3590190" data-attributes="member: 360">Err... I'm talking about fundamental principles of computer science here. An application has to scale almost perfectly with extra cores to make more than 4 useful. It happens that the kind of work that's normally offloaded onto graphics cards often does scale almost perfectly, but that's a long way from being a general case. IPC overhead adds up. And so traditional multithreaded programming cannot make use of large numbers of CPUs effectively in most cases.It boggles me that so many people seem to have complete faith that programmers will 'figure out multithreading' or something to make large numbers of CPU cores useful to general-purpose applications, when there's absolutely no evidence that this will happen. It's a problem very smart people have been working for over thirty years, and they haven't come up with a solution yet. If there is one -- and I'm not at all sure there is; I expect large numbers of CPU cores to remain concentrated in servers and specialized applications -- it's going to require radical changes in programming techniques. Let's not forget that it took decades for procedural programming to replace assembler and GOTO statements, and as long for object-oriented programming to become mainstream. Any future radical shifts will also take a long time to trickle down to Joe packaged-software developer with a multi-million dollar budget, and longer yet to Dave line-of-business programmer who's lucky if he has one or two other programmers on his team.Incidentally, this is why the Xbox 360's Xenon CPU is bad, and the PS3's Cell is downright awful. But the big guys in the console industry got caught up with the maximum theoretical performance at the lowest price (MS) and with demonstrating something cool (Sony) and that's a big part of why the radically underpowered Wii is doing well. A dual-core traditional CPU would have been a much better choice for any of them.</blockquote>

Verification