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Published in PC Hardware

Intel cracks the whip at software developers

by on02 July 2008

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Quad & Octa-core apps are not enough

 

Intel has talked about this earlier, but this time it seems they’re quite serious about making it happen sooner, rather than later. Apparently, Intel thinks that it’s not enough for developers to aim at dual, quad or even octa-cores. That might be due to the fact that Intel plans to continue with increasing the number of cores, and that apps should be built to put cores to better use.

There are two ways of writing software for multi-core processors: the first, where you target the first two or four and possibly extend it to eight or more cores; and the second way, which Intel is quite fond of, where software will be written in a way where it’ll run on as many cores as they’d like.

This method might be more costly, but it’ll prove effective in time, especially knowing the rapid trends of doubling the number cores. Apparently, targeting a few cores is soon to be a thing of the past.

The scenario should go like this – game engines could be split to utilize several cores that would, for instance, independently run sound, graphics and AI. By breaking up computations to steps, each step can be assigned to a certain core. However, that would still result in a fixed number of cores. 

Intel thinks that each of those tasks should be split to run on an unlimited number of cores. That, unfortunately for developers, means that all the engines, sound, graphics, etc. would have to be rewritten in a way where they’d spread the workload over available cores. Sounds easy? Didn’t think so!

Ray Tracing, for instance, uses such a method that easily assigns tasks to as many cores as you throw at it, so if you want more speed – throw some more cores at it. However, not every task can be split that way, and we’ve yet to see how long will it take software developers to develop such apps.

It’s a well-known fact that, since we’ve jumped on a multi-core train, faster processors don’t provide such drastic performance boosts. So, now that we’ve got the hardware, I guess it’s time for software to catch up.

More here.

Last modified on 03 July 2008
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