Next Generation of Language
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From: Tim Bradshaw on 9 Jan 2007 04:27 Pascal Bourguignon wrote: > > Of anything. Galaxies, planets, meteo, ecosystems, animals, cells, > nanobots, chemicals, particules, etc. I think you're missing my point (which is, I admit, a bit subtle, especially by the standards of cll in recent history). I don't doubt that multicore processors will make it into desktops in a big way. But they will make it into desktops for reasons which are not what you might think, and in particular are substantially not due to the computational demands of desktop applications. So for instance: do a commercially significant proportion of desktop users spend their time simulating ecosystems, the weather, galaxies etc? I suggest that they do not, and they will not. (As to whether multicore CPUs are a good approach to that kind of simulation: I suspect they're not as good as you might think, but that's another story.) > Let me see, in my far out corner of the net, my ISP doubled my ADSL > speed every year (without me asking anything even). In ten years, I > should have here 2Gb/s of Internet bandwidth. I don't think 64 cores > will be too many to handle that. I suspect it will top out long before that. It's amazing (really, it is a deeply spectacular feat of engineering) what can be got over a phone line, but there are limits. More to the point latency is not something you can make vanish. > That's because rendering consumes all CPU that nothing else is done in > games (but tricks). All the interesting rendering happens in the video card, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Video cards already often have considerably more (specialised) computing power than general purpose CPUs on serious gaming PCs. They cost more than the rest of the machine too. > They won't be anymore. Sorry, they will. The memory wall is emphatically not going away. --tim
From: Rob Thorpe on 9 Jan 2007 05:34 Tim Bradshaw wrote: > Pascal Bourguignon wrote: > > (game) AI. > > I know nothing about games really, but I'd lay odds that the thing that > consumes almost all the computational resource is rendering. See above. The rendering does, but it performs most of it in the graphics hardware. Of the remaining runtime a large proportion is consumed by game "AI". I remember reading that one recent first-per-shooter game used 50% of it's runtime for AI controlling the movement of the enemies. Whether this type of AI actually is AI of-course varies from game to game.
From: Tim Bradshaw on 9 Jan 2007 06:29 Rob Thorpe wrote: > The rendering does, but it performs most of it in the graphics > hardware. That was my point: the computationally demanding part of the application *already* lives in special-purpose hardware, and will continue to do so. And I suggest that as games become closer and closer to being photorealistic, the rendering will consume vastly more resources, almost none of which can usefully be provided by a general purpose multicore CPU. > Of the remaining runtime a large proportion is consumed by game "AI". Yes, and the issue is: how much more of that is needed? I suggest the answer might be `much much less than is needed in the rendering'. --tim
From: Pascal Bourguignon on 9 Jan 2007 06:59 "Tim Bradshaw" <tfb+google(a)tfeb.org> writes: > Pascal Bourguignon wrote: > >> >> Of anything. Galaxies, planets, meteo, ecosystems, animals, cells, >> nanobots, chemicals, particules, etc. > > I think you're missing my point (which is, I admit, a bit subtle, > especially by the standards of cll in recent history). > > I don't doubt that multicore processors will make it into desktops in a > big way. But they will make it into desktops for reasons which are not > what you might think, and in particular are substantially not due to > the computational demands of desktop applications. > > So for instance: do a commercially significant proportion of desktop > users spend their time simulating ecosystems, the weather, galaxies > etc? I suggest that they do not, and they will not. (As to whether > multicore CPUs are a good approach to that kind of simulation: I > suspect they're not as good as you might think, but that's another > story.) Ah, well, if you want to discuss the real reason why they'll be put in desktop PC, it's clearly because they cannot increase the clock frequency much more, so instead being able to say "Hey, my PC has a 5GHz processor!", we must be able to say "Hey, my PC has 128 cores!". Anyways, you leave us expecting. What is the reason we're not suspecting why multicores will spread on desktops? >> Let me see, in my far out corner of the net, my ISP doubled my ADSL >> speed every year (without me asking anything even). In ten years, I >> should have here 2Gb/s of Internet bandwidth. I don't think 64 cores >> will be too many to handle that. > > I suspect it will top out long before that. It's amazing (really, it > is a deeply spectacular feat of engineering) what can be got over a > phone line, but there are limits. More to the point latency is not > something you can make vanish. They'll have switched to optical fiber by then. Perhaps by nanobots who would convert the coper in the existing cable into some kind of transparent copper cristal ;-) -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/ This is a signature virus. Add me to your signature and help me to live.
From: Tim Bradshaw on 9 Jan 2007 07:19
Pascal Bourguignon wrote: > "Tim Bradshaw" <tfb+google(a)tfeb.org> writes: > > Ah, well, if you want to discuss the real reason why they'll be put in > desktop PC, it's clearly because they cannot increase the clock > frequency much more, so instead being able to say "Hey, my PC has a > 5GHz processor!", we must be able to say "Hey, my PC has 128 cores!". > Anyways, you leave us expecting. What is the reason we're not > suspecting why multicores will spread on desktops? Basically what you say (so, clearly it is what you were expecting anyway): they have to keep selling upgrades to people. I think a couple of other reasons (don't know their respective importance) are - power consumption: people, I hope, will finally realise that liquid cooled PCs are actually not funny; - it's what the CPU vendors will have to sell: they won't want to spend huge amounts of money developing entirely different desktop and server processors (I'm not sure if this argument holds water). |