http://www.techpowerup.com/?19759
Looks like fun. I wonder what kind of effect this will have in the future...
ID:277208
 Nov 6 2006, 8:07 pm
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Nov 10 2006, 1:58 pm
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Crispy
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Now that's an interesting idea.
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I can't imagine how much fun developers would have trying to program for 512 cores.
~Kujila | |
Woot, I can finally play ultra-HD civilisation!
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I don't know much about multi-thread technology and dual-cores and such, but I imagine that it wouldn't be up to the developer. Right now software needs to be rewritten if it is to take advantage of multiple cores, but when multiple cores become the norm I imagine all that would be taken care of automatically at OS-level or lower.
You'd give the computer a number of instructions and it'd intelligently hand out the workload between the 1024 cores that are running under the hood (imagine how many games of lemmings you could run simultaenously!). That said I don't know anything about it, so it's just wishful thinking on my part. | |
Right. Developers didn't have to change programs specifically for HT, the processor done it intelligently. Windows XP offers some multicore features, though I don't know the extent of them.
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To take advantage of all 512 cores, you would need to have 512 different threads running. That's an insane amount for most practical applications; games can get away with a few, but most of their calculations depend pretty heavily on the results of their other calculations, so the amount of parallel computation you can do is limited.
Where that many cores would really be useful is for certain scientific computations. They can often be designed so that they parallelise as much as you like, since they tend to have individual batches of data that don't depend on the results of the other batches. Threaded chess AI would also work pretty well (Deep Blue anyone?). | |