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Ivy Bridge and Haswell - The More Cores, Not The Merrier? Ivy Bridge and Haswell - The More Cores, Not The Merrier?
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Ivy Bridge and Haswell - The More Cores, Not The Merrier?
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Old 19th August 2008, 18:30   #1
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Default Ivy Bridge and Haswell - The More Cores, Not The Merrier?

Intel announces 22nm processors, but it seems like their answer to "too much" is more. We have a few more Intel code names to toss into the pile. Their 22nm processors are supposed to be called Ivy Bridge and Haswell.

That's nice, but outside of broadening SSE to 256-bit, a few other tweaks and a little more cache, all you say about these chips is More Cores. Great. We can't use four cores now, so let's add more!!

Seriously, why does Grandma need six or eight cores? Why does Granddaughter need six or eight cores? I hear some of the justifications being spewed out for this, and I try to see a corporate world where word processing is out, video processing is in. And if I try really, really hard for a while, I can actually get some blurry glimpses of something like that, a dozen years from now. Not now, not soon.

http://overclockers.com/index.php?op...=57:processors
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Old 19th August 2008, 19:53   #2
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If everyone in the past 40 years had thought the way the author of this article does, we'd all be still sitting in front of typewriters... Denying the future doesn't yield any gains, and even though the profits of some particular research may not be obvious to the naked eye today, they will become ubiquitous tommorow, as history has clearly shown. Many areas of high-tech research are overkill for our needs today, and processor development doesn't make any exception.

For once I agree, many task can't be parallelized, and writing parallel code is no easy game; but programming paradigms are evolving to higher abstract levels (a small example would be OpenMP, but it's still on a rather low level), so soon we will witness new and elegant ways for easily and transparently writing parallel tasks.

Me too could't imagine some time ago needing a dual processor machine ever, but now that I'm using one, it's clear to me that it's a matter of time to reach for an eigh-core configuration. Denying it sounds to me like claiming the earth is flat.
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Old 19th August 2008, 23:41   #3
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THe thing is, he's right that "Grandma" doesn't need 6-8 cores. But almost everyone needs 2 cores today for the best performance, even if the program is single-threaded, because of everything else that is running on typical PCs or because of Vista.

And I very much agree with you that there is a clear need for 8 core CPUs. The HPC market is clamoring for them, much the workstation market needs them, and some enthusiasts can even use them.
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Old 20th August 2008, 10:29   #4
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I'm onboard with the 2 core thing, Hyperthreading in Pentium 4 proved that having more threads being handled simultaneously can really speed up things, even if the competition has faster single threaded performance (Athlon XP vs Pentium 4).

But beyond 2 cores things go downhill very fast, the amount of application used every day that actually can use 2+ cores is very small; how many people encode/render ? okay latest version of Excel (2007) allows multi-core support; but how many have such complicated formulas in Excel sheet to require more than one core?

everyday users needing more than 1 core? not really. This is just their way to keep pushing new products; if they were able to push GHZ boundaries like in the past, we would not have seen the multi-core approach so soon. these companies have to make a living so they have to try to sell their products, whether the customers need them or not.

the truth is though that none-gaming/none-encoding/render machines can be build from 4-5 year old hardware and they'll still be plenty fast.
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Old 20th August 2008, 11:59   #5
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Ah, but I was careful to say workstations and some enthusiasts. The average PC user that is familiar with and regularly uses a PC wouldn't use 3-4 cores, but almost any enthusiast can and many do. And then, there are those regular users than leave two dozen random, small single-threaded programs running at once even though not needed, I'm sure you've seen those kind of users.

For example doesn't matter how many cores a PC has, Folding@home can use all of them at once. More than several hundred thousand F@H users exist now, not counting all of the other dozens of DC related projects of which some are also sizable.

A large number of users do encode/recode tasks these days, whether it is ripping CDs, recompressing vids to fit on portable media devices, joining, or splitting vids for download, or recompressing to stream over the internet. A sizeable portion of iPod owners seem to be doing this for videos.

Even an everyday user can notice the difference in speed and system response between a single core and dualcore. Vista required dualcore for that reason, or at minimum a P4 with HT.
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Old 20th August 2008, 12:55   #6
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I discourage anybody to run any application that uses 100% CPU time in the background, the extra energy cost on year basis is enough to convince them
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Old 20th August 2008, 23:04   #7
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If the PC runs 24/7 already, then the difference between idle/load shouldn't be very significant on electric rates. I don't mind covering the difference, is better than leaving the computer idle IMO.
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