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Sure, there's been high end niche products for anything forever. You could buy a 64 core computer in 1990 (they'd call it a supercomputer, but same thing). The
by skrebbel 9y ago
Sure, there's been high end niche products for anything forever. You could buy a 64 core computer in 1990 (they'd call it a supercomputer, but same thing).
The people telling us we had to go change our code to use parallel processing fast predicted a significantly faster increase in amount-of-cores on commodity hardware. Instead, CPUs stopped getting faster and hardly gained more parallellism.
- pdpi 9y agoYou could buy a 64 processor machine in 1990, but it wouldn’t have been a 64 core machine in the sense we’re talking about — a single socket system. This isn’t some trivial distinction either, as the whole memory architecture is very different indeed for the two scenarios.
- makomk 9y agoEven in single-socket configurations, Threadripper and EPYC are still both NUMA architectures - the cores are split across two or four dies, each of which has its own memory controller and memory attached to it, with requests from a core to memory on another die going via an interconnect.