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> Very few applications scale with cores You mean like compilers and test suites ? Very few professional workloads don't parallelize well these days.
by rafaelmn 7mo ago
> Very few applications scale with cores
You mean like compilers and test suites ? Very few professional workloads don't parallelize well these days.
- VorpalWay 7mo agoCompilers and test suits do scale (at least for C/C++ and Rust, which is what I work with). But I think the parent comment referred to consumer applications: games, word processing, light browsing, ... (Though games these days scale better than they used to, but only up to a to a point.) I find that most tools I write for my own use can be made to scale with cores, or run so fast that the overhead of starting threads is longer than the program runtime. But I write that in Rust which makes parallelism easy. If I wrote that code in C++ I would probably not bother with trying to parallelize.
- rafaelmn 7mo agoBut those tools aren't really compute bound anyway - you're not buying a workstation to do them, you're getting a consumer laptop or a tablet.
- loeg 7mo agoAnd that consumer device should have ECC! That's the whole discussion here.
- zadikian 7mo agoIt's confusing because a few comments up is "for the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper" which is unrelated to ECC.
- loeg 7mo agoI think it's coherent -- it's an argument for why most people don't want to buy Workstation class products just to get ECC. (Prices scale with core count. Not linearly, but still.)
- rafaelmn 7mo agoWhy ? If your device is a thin client for web services/gaming the risk of bitflips/bad ram is a minor annoyance.
- loeg 7mo agoI disagree with your handwaving bitflips away as a minor annoyance. Consumers don't love software crashing, even if they don't have any data they care about. Imagine ECC was free -- would you rather have free ECC and no bitflips, or no ECC and bitflips? It's hard to imagine choosing bitflips.
- throwaway85825 7mo agoECC would save an unbelievable amount of labor. A shocking number of people have jobs looking at various logs.
- throwaway85825 7mo agoOnly a small percentage of computer users are programmers.
- loeg 7mo agoTest suites often don't scale, actually. Unit tests usually run single-threaded by default, and also relatively often have side effects on the system that mean they're unsafe to run in parallel. (Sure, sure, you could definitely argue the latter thing is a skill issue.)
- zadikian 7mo agoIn theory, do you need a single machine for any of that, or would it be cheaper to use a low-availability cloud cluster? Tests are totally independent, and builds probably parallel enough.