How Many Processor Cores Are Enough?
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From: Benny Amorsen on 1 Oct 2006 17:31 >>>>> "CT" == Chris Thomasson <cristom(a)comcast.net> writes: CT> For instance, they murdered a boatload of U.S. Marines in cold CT> blood... Isn't that what war is about? /Benny
From: jsavard on 2 Oct 2006 00:16 Jon Forrest wrote: > The big difference > here is that additional processor cores only help if there's > work for them to do. Modern operating systems use multiple > processes and threads but I wonder how many processes/threads > are runnable at any one time in a general purpose computer > running general purpose jobs. I think you're asking the wrong question. For some purposes, the point of diminishing returns is at "two". So does that automatically mean that multi-core designs are a bad idea? No, because there's the other half of the equation to consider. For one thing, it is true that there is no point of diminishing returns in making the same processor design run faster. But increasing clock speed through making transistors faster is *hard*, and bumps into a *lot* of things that do have diminishing returns. For another, where is the point of diminishing returns in adding more transistors to a CPU design, to make it faster that way? Designs with cache, aggressive pipelining, and superscalar arithmetic units... pretty well are *at* that point. Once you've done just about as well as you can in these areas, about the only reasonable-cost avenue you have *left* for improving performance is to include more processor cores in your design. This is where the microcomputer revolution has ended up at present - where it's almost impossible to design a "supercomputer" that has better single-thread performance than your desktop PC. Not totally impossible, though; there is room to get ahead of that curve a little bit - the Itanium is proof of that, for example. John Savard
From: jsavard on 2 Oct 2006 00:32 Benny Amorsen wrote: > >>>>> "CT" == Chris Thomasson <cristom(a)comcast.net> writes: > CT> For instance, they murdered a boatload of U.S. Marines in cold > CT> blood... > Isn't that what war is about? So? War is the application of force on a larger scale than that of, say, crime and law-enforcement. However, despite the accident of the language in providing only one word for war, in a war, there is still often one side that is engaged in aggression, and one side that is seeking to live in peace. Israel, like Denmark and the United States, is a democratic country of happy, peaceful people. But it has neighbors that have non-democratic governments, and poorly-educated populations that tend to support a social order in which non-Muslims have inferior status: they need permissions Muslims don't require to repair their places of worship, and are not allowed to build new ones, for example. These neighbors, when the United States showed them that it did not approve of them getting into a fight to recapture land from Israel - land they lost due to their attempts to drive the Israelis into the sea - turned to the *Union of Soviet Socialist Republics* to obtain armaments. The USSR should need no introduction. After one totalitarian system, Nazism, was defeated in World War II, it became the pre-eminent threat to human freedom for several decades. It subverted democracy in Eastern Europe, so that the peoples of these countries, after suffering like the rest of Europe under Nazism, emerged not to a new dawn of freedom, but to continued oppression. It sat astride the world like a terrible shadow, thanks to the atomic weapons it obtained through espionage operations against the United States of America. And, of course, the horrors of its slave labor camps are recounted in the classic "Gulag Archipelago" of Aleksandr Isaevitch Solzenitsyn. As we also remember, in October 1973, in the course of one of their attempts to annihilate Israel, the countries of the Arab world imposed an oil embargo on the Western world. THIS WAS A TIME WHEN THE USSR WAS STILL IN EXISTENCE. Yesterday, those who desired a world where Muslims ruled everyone else, and Jews and Christians know their place, while Hindus (not being people of the book) would convert or die risked plunging the whole world into Communist slavery. Today, they fly airplanes into office buildings. Only a few months ago, some of your countrymen were beaten by a mob in Sa'udi Arabia for the crime of being Danish. Today, a Frenchman is in hiding for having publicly stated the historical fact that Mohammed *was* a merciless war leader. Who the aggressor is in this war is clear, and the need for victory is clear as well. It is hoped that the fanatics within Islam can be crushed and destroyed without also harming the ordinary people of the Muslim world, who, doubtless, like people everywhere, wish to live peaceful lives, not being bothered by either militaristic tyrants or by extreme religious fanatics to be more observant of their religion than they choose to be. John Savard
From: jsavard on 2 Oct 2006 00:33 David Hopwood wrote: > Yep -- all those Arabic-script languages with slightly different sort orders... Well, the Arabs have clearly conquered the world. The 8086 architecture, after all, is little-endian. John Savard
From: Bill Todd on 2 Oct 2006 04:11
jsavard(a)ecn.ab.ca wrote: .... > As we also remember, in October 1973, in the course of one of their > attempts to annihilate Israel, the countries of the Arab world imposed > an oil embargo on the Western world. Why, of all the nerve! To presume to limit access to *our* oil just because it happened to be situated under *their* sand! > > THIS WAS A TIME WHEN THE USSR WAS STILL IN EXISTENCE. And, unfortunately, we're now in a situation where that time doesn't look that bad after all, since they served as an effective curb on U.S. aggression. Idiot. - bill |