Question:
"Dual Core" a big bore
Adobe programmers say it's not as good as the advertising promises.
http://news.com.com/2061-10791_3-6146661.html
Answer:
Re: "Dual Core" a big bore
Yea that is true, if you have verry little RAM- Large amounts of ram will utilize that mulitcore processing since the CPU can process more chunks per MS, it just needs the ram to store them quickly and push them through instead of bottlenecking on the rest of the system - Nice article though.
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Re: "Dual Core" a big bore
I knew it! That and the overheating means I'll take an ML-44 for my next machine please! :D
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Re: "Dual Core" a big bore
If some of the software takes advantage of the software, why not rewrite the parts that dont?
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Re: "Dual Core" a big bore
Eh, all I got from that article is that depending on what you are trying to do depends on how useful multi-cores will be...
Well DUH!!!!!
Isn't obvious both that some operations can never benefit from multicores since they must be single threaded, and that some operations will run into other limiting factors (memory speed, graphics card speed, hard drive speed, you know, all those OTHER bottlenecks in PC's).
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Re: "Dual Core" a big bore
Are two cars better than one? Depends on whether you have two people driving them or not. If you only have one driver, there's very little benefit. People thinking that dual-core will double their processing speed are mistaken. People that think that it will allow their machine to multitask better, as well as perform calculations that are optimized for multiple threads/processes faster are correct. It runs many graphical rendering programs a lot faster for me because it has multiple CPU's, or allows me to dedicate one core to processing images while I can still use the machine to surf, play non-memory-intensive games, etc. without slowdown.
And Adobe needs to hire better mathematicians and/or software engineers if they can't parallelize multiple partial-differential equation solutions.
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Re: "Dual Core" a big bore
"And Adobe needs to hire better mathematicians and/or software engineers if they can't parallelize multiple partial-differential equation solutions."
I was thinking the same exact thing -
Answer:
Re: "Dual Core" a big bore
Yea that is true, if you have verry little RAM- Large amounts of ram will utilize that mulitcore processing since the CPU can process more chunks per MS, it just needs the ram to store them quickly and push them through instead of bottlenecking on the rest of the system - Nice article though.
The amount of RAM has nothing to do with how many cores are utilized. Or with the speed at which RAM can be accessed.
What the article is saying is twofold:
1: Not all tasks on a CPU can be distributed to multiple cores. Any programmer can tell you that. Some tasks are just inherently serial, and there is nothing to be gained by adding more CPU cores.
2: Even with tasks that can be parallelized, that may not make a difference if the bottleneck is memory access. RAM is terribly slow compared to CPU's. There are a lot of clever tricks employed to make RAM seem faster than it is, but ultimately, we get what, 12 GB/s of bandwidth to even the fastest dualchannel DDR2 system. That's not much compared to the amount of data two or four CPU cores can churn through. Again, for some tasks this is a problem, for others it isn't.
If some of the software takes advantage of the software, why not rewrite the parts that dont?
Because it's not always possible. Some things just have to be computed serially. If you have a series of operations, and each one depends on the result of the previous one, there's just nothing to do. You can only use one core at a time, because only one task is ready for execution at any time.
And of course, in the cases where it *is* possible, it still costs a lot of money to rewrite things. So in those cases, it's still very much a gradual process.
And Adobe needs to hire better mathematicians and/or software engineers if they can't parallelize multiple partial-differential equation solutions.
True, *if* that is the problem.
But I suspect that such equations are not the main bottleneck in Photoshop. As they say, it's an application that consumes a lot of memory bandwidth. If you have to iterate through a 50MB image file, then it takes a certain amount of time to just access all the data in RAM. And while the operations that have to be performed on each pixel may be able to be parallelized or distributed between cores, that may not help if each core just has to spend that much longer waiting for the data they requested.
It depends. But it's no secret that memory speeds are lagging horribly behind CPU speeds. For many applications, this can be hidden, but sometimes, if what you really need is lots of memory accesses, there's just not much to do, and adding more CPU cores won't improve the matter.
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Re: "Dual Core" a big bore
What I get from the article is what I suspected: that if you already have a Pentium M 1866 MHz CPU running under 30W (as I do) there's very little benefit to going to a slightly hungrier, hotter chip that does things just a wee bit faster in most instances. I'll put my wallet back in my pocket and wait a few years. My suspicion is that the doubling of cores from 2 to 4 (then 8, 16?) is not going to be the right road forward.
Answer:
Re: "Dual Core" a big bore
Give me a break. The article is bad journalism--A nice flashy title, that doesn't have anything to do with its content.
The guy is talking about 8 and 16 core machines, not dual core. In fact, except for the flashy title and intro paragraph, the article doesn't even mention dual core cpus.
duh.