4 ms·
> Once network IO became the main bottleneck, the faster CPU mattered less. It is surprisingly hard to keep a modern CPU core properly saturated unless you are
by bob1029 1y ago
> Once network IO became the main bottleneck, the faster CPU mattered less.
It is surprisingly hard to keep a modern CPU core properly saturated unless you are baking global illumination, searching primes or mining crypto currency. I/O and latency will almost always dominate at scale. Moving information is way more expensive than processing it.
- furkansahin 1y agoCertainly! That was the main reason why we decided to try postgres benchmarking tbh
- cma 1y agoSome major game engines still have large single thread bottlenecks. They aren't fundamental to the problem space though, more just from legacy engine design decisions.
- SkiFire13 1y agoBeing single thread bottlenecked doesn't mean they are actually saturating a CPU core, it may likely be waiting for data from RAM for a lot if not most of the time.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoThe solution is simple. A bog-standard RISC instruction set, with 64 billion 256-bit registers. The operating system will come on the die, etched into the silicon. There will be no ram and no storage.
- cma 1y agoIf they had it multithreaded, the execution ports could be used on the other threads while one thread is affected by RAM latency. And if there is a pointer chasey task that isn't utilizing all of the core and is waiting on memory and data dependencies, often that just makes threading a bigger win, 16 threads doing pointer chases instead of one if you aren't memory bandwidth bound.
- nine_k 1y agoBig machines already are more like clusters (NUMA), where access to memory outside a core's domain is much slower. I suspect compute will be more and more dispersed within RAM. Transputers just came 30+ years too early.
- BitsAndObjects 1y agoLol, transputers getting their 5-yearly re-mention. In most of the ways that matter, Transputers weren’t too early. And if you built one again now, you’d find little to no market for it (as per efforts by several startups and various related research efforts). Sources: many conversations with the architect of Transputer, and various of the engineers that designed the hardware and Occam, and watching the Inmos 40th Anniversary lectures on YouTube (channel: @ednutting). Also being in the processor design startup space.
- malux85 1y agoOr running molecular simulations, I can keep our whole cluster pegged at 100% CPU for weeks
- yieldcrv 1y agoI've heard generative AI is better at that, or determining configurations and folding patterns But I figure it is a broad field, so I'm curious what you're doing and if it is the best use of time and energy I'm also assuming that the generative AI model wouldn't run on your machine well and need to be elsewhere
- dcrazy 1y agoYou’ve heard that generative AI is better at what, precisely? Many problems rely on simulations that follow rules derived from experimentation or theory. Are you suggesting that replacing such a simulation with a generative model that appears to follow similar rules is superior?
- malux85 1y ago^ Exactly, generative AI can /sometimes/ help at /sometimes/ the first step of high throughput structure searching for example, but if you want results that are grounded in reality, then you need to fallback to classical simulations based on the laws of physics to verify them. I think the above answer was just a hype parrot I would love it if generative AI could get us even further, we are severely compute limited and also testing in the lab is 20k a pop ... I am strongly incentivised for generative AI to be the answer, but as someone who works deeply in the field, the hype is real.
- theamk 1y agoC++ compilation can do this trivially, as long as you have enough RAM.
- ksec 1y ago>It is surprisingly hard to keep a modern CPU core properly saturated Modern PS5 developments already shows SSD I/O is getting faster than CPU core can keep up. It is also not true when CPU is still the limiting factor on Web Server.