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| I am now with 6 open tabs in Firefox, one terminal with four tabs, a music player decoding an internet radio stream, an E-mail client and Emacs with two windo

| I am now with 6 open tabs in Firefox, one terminal with four tabs, a music player decoding an internet radio stream, an E-mail client and Emacs with two windows open and a Python process running in it. Only two of those 'normal' activities consume cycles. Your CouchDB may be parallel, but that's not a typical desktop job. The truths are a) most desktop use is over-covered by current, single or dual CPUs b) you can't convert all sequential apps to parallel, as earnestly as Intel and AMD might wish for it. That is, until there are radical agents acting on your behalf, sussing out interesting things on the internet for you and whatever, but those would probably run in a cloud somewhere anyway. Of course this will be proved wrong in time but, I don't think that current desktop apps, /just written for parallel/, will ever use 50 cores.

deleted 16y ago
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rbanffy 16y ago
I agree most desktop needs are very well served by current processors, but we can look further down the road. The only reason there are very few active threads on my desktop is that its processor cannot deal with more than two active threads. Making applications more parallel than that is pointless - it would only increase management overhead. Still, pretty little of my desktop workload is inherently serial (and most of what is serial is that way because of some implementation flaw). It's a chicken-and-egg problem. SMP did not receive much attention from mainstream processor manufacturers until OSs that could use it became common, and, even then, x86s are heavily optimized for single-thread performance because they have to run software that was developed before SMP became commonplace. Build a 16-thread ARM to compete (price, power envelope) with an Atom and you'll see people optimizing for 16 threads instead of two.

deleted 16y ago

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rbanffy 16y ago

I agree most desktop needs are very well served by current processors, but we can look further down the road. The only reason there are very few active threads on my desktop is that its processor cannot deal with more than two active threads. Making applications more parallel than that is pointless - it would only increase management overhead. Still, pretty little of my desktop workload is inherently serial (and most of what is serial is that way because of some implementation flaw). It's a chicken-and-egg problem. SMP did not receive much attention from mainstream processor manufacturers until OSs that could use it became common, and, even then, x86s are heavily optimized for single-thread performance because they have to run software that was developed before SMP became commonplace. Build a 16-thread ARM to compete (price, power envelope) with an Atom and you'll see people optimizing for 16 threads instead of two.