80 Cores

[Clocker]

Very very interesting. I'm sure you already read the news. Sounds like a fantastic investment opportunity if you can find and invest in a company that will be the best at developing software to handle many, many cores efficiently ....before they get bought out by M$ or some other large tech company.

"The software community isn't able yet to really grasp two cores effectively, let alone four or eight. Larger numbers are well beyond the current skill set," Enderle explained.

If software makers are not careful, they could be steamrolled by multi-core technology, Gartner's Reynolds added. He predicted that new software companies will emerge who have a new approach to the problem, and they will displace existing manufacturers.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/55717.html

 

[LiamC]

If you have a look at the block diagram of the NVIDIA G80, it looks like a ring bus connecting 128 "cores". AMD's R600 is expected to be similar. I'm afraid that AMD/ATi and NVIDIA have already made significant steps in the direction of Intel's multi-core graphics chip.

Fusion/Stream processing (HPC/Folding) on GPU's is evidence that the toolsets exist for using highly parallelisable code on massive multi-core chips.

 

[LOST6200]

Very very interesting. I'm sure you already read the news. Sounds like a fantastic investment opportunity if you can find and invest in a company that will be the best at developing software to handle many, many cores efficiently ....before they get bought out by M$ or some other large tech company.

Yeah, i read tits. But MS will ned anbout 72 of those corees just for the Vista replacment in a few years.

 

[Handruin]

Yeah, i read tits.

I can only guess in braille?

 

[ddrueding]

I can only guess in braille?

LOL, beat me to it. Though I find that such braille becomes more clear after the 10th or 20th reading...

 

[Tannin]

I prefer white tits myself. Or brown; black if desired. A pale pink is OK, but I draw the line at red ones.

(Tannin, that's READ, pronounced REED, not RED as in "last night I read a book".)

(By the way, what are tits?)

 

[LiamC]

(By the way, what are tits?)

http://www.fendigital.co.uk/assets/images/autogen/a_coal_tit_eating_from_a_bird_feeder.jpg

 

[sechs]

"The software community isn't able yet to really grasp two cores effectively, let alone four or eight. Larger numbers are well beyond the current skill set," Enderle explained.

That I have to run a special utility to keep some programs from using more than one core should pretty much let you know the state of things.

 

[Handruin]

What utility is that, and what program do you need to isolate?

 

[Will Rickards]

Well I have a custom startup program I wrote that isolates picasa to one core. Before I did that it wouldn't detect new files.

 

[Handruin]

Wow, that's not good. Was this under windows XP? I'm really surprised that Picasa was programmed so that it can't handle additional CPU's. I mean, it seems almost intentionally done that way.

 

[Will Rickards]

Yes XP. A few people found my newsgroup posting about it and have asked for the program. So it isn't just me. Maybe they've fixed it already.

 

[Handruin]

I certainly wasn't doubting you. I'm just surprised that multiple CPU's causes this issue. I would have thought CPU time would have been managed by XP. I haven't done any SMP programming so I don't know if it is more complicated than thread management when processing the same data.

 

[sechs]

The problems tend to have to do with (1) timing and (2) cache misses.

Cache missed just tend to make stuff run far less well than is would on a single core. Timing issues are worse, as they can make the application screw up.

Installing the AMD dual-core optimizer made a real difference in a number of programs (mostly games) for me.

 

[Handruin]

Is the AMD dual core optimizer the same tool you mentioned above (the special utility)? If not, where did you get the tool and what else does it do?

 

[Clocker]

I had to use the AMD Dual Core Optimizer or else the audio and video would not synch up with my TV tuner card.

 

[Handruin]

What does it do? Does it simply isolate the app to a single core as previously mentioned or does it do something different?

 

[ddrueding]

What does it do? Does it simply isolate the app to a single core as previously mentioned or does it do something different?

Link to download...

AMD Dual-Core Optimizer - The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer can help improve some PC gaming video performance by compensating for those applications that bypass the Windows API for timing by directly using the RDTSC (Read Time Stamp Counter) instruction. Applications that rely on RDTSC do not benefit from the logic in the operating system to properly account for the affect of power management mechanisms on the rate at which a processor core's Time Stamp Counter (TSC) is incremented. The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer helps to correct the resulting video performance effects or other incorrect timing effects that these applications may experience on dual-core processor systems, by periodically adjusting the core time-stamp-counters, so that they are synchronized.

 

[LiamC]

It adjusts the RDTSC to compenate for poor design/programming choices in a multi-threaded world...

 

[LOST6200]

Yeah, i read tits. But MS will ned anbout 72 of those corees just for the Vista replacment in a few years.

I read this.

 

[Splash]

80 processor cores on the board, 80 processor cores,
Take one down and pass it around, 79 processor cores on the board.

79 processor cores on the board, 79 processor cores,
Take one down and pass it around, 78 processor cores on the board.

78 processor cores on the board, 78 processor cores,
Take one down and pass it around, 77 processor cores on the board.

77 processor cores on the board, 77 processor cores,
Take one down and pass it around, 76 processor cores on the board.
.
.
.

2 processor cores on the board, 2 processor cores,
Take one down and pass it around, 1 processor core on the board.

1 processor core on the board, 1 processor core,
Take one down and pass it around, no more processor cores on the board.

No more processor cores on the board, no more processor cores,
Go to the store and buy some more, 99 bottles of beer on the wall.