Quad-Core, Early Tests

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 3:46 pm

It's pretty damn impressive... however the current architectures are hitting a wall in terms of I/O and memory communication so having a faster than light CPU isn't that big of an issue when the bottleneck is somewhere else to begin with.

Willen · Post by **Willen** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 12:12 am

Well, Intel did hint that they'll be moving to a point-to-point serial interface when they revealed details of Nehalem recently.

Anandtech wrote:Nehalem will no longer use a FSB but a serial point to point interconnect. Even more revolutionary is the fact that Nehalem will have an integrated memory controller (IMC) and that the number of serial interconnects is variable (Intel's version of "HyperTransport").

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/in ... i=2955&p=3

An integrated memory controller (which AMD has been using for years) will also help with mitigating any I/O bottlenecks.

Kariudo · Post by **Kariudo** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 12:51 am

that gets me wondering how amd's fusion core will turn out (fusion core will have the gpu integrated onto the cpu die, I'm guessing it'l achive a similar result as integrating the memory controller had)
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/displa ... 34458.html

Kalium · Post by **Kalium** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 10:36 am

Looks like my databases professor was right. We have all these nice and parallel systems, but most programmers have no idea how to use them.

(I do, but it's a pain.)

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 11:10 am

Kalium wrote:Looks like my databases professor was right. We have all these nice and parallel systems, but most programmers have no idea how to use them.

(I do, but it's a pain.)

There's a whole graduate course at my university dedicated to building programs for parallel computing - my roommates are both planning on taking it. The fact that there's entire courses designed around it makes it seem like it's a rather advanced topic. Perhaps there are just so few people out there that find it interesting enough to pursue.

Kalium · Post by **Kalium** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 3:52 pm

There are. I took a 500-level course on parallel computing last semester. The fact that multi-core processors are essentially shared memory makes life somewhat easier, but not too much. The locking problem is still a pain.