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"I doubt tablets will ever need 256 cores. Desktop computers don't need that much either" And 640k will be enough for everyone. Hey, you might even be right a
by Karellen 12y ago
"I doubt tablets will ever need 256 cores. Desktop computers don't need that much either"
And 640k will be enough for everyone.
Hey, you might even be right about not needing them, but that doesn't mean those devices won't get them. You don't really need a 32-bit CPU to run your microwave or washing machine, but very few of the ones you buy today are running 8-bit microcontrollers with hand-coded assembler.
Though clock speeds stopped increasing some time ago, Moore's law marches on, and we're still getting more and more transistors per buck. Sure, some of them will go to more L1/L2 cache, but at some point the bandwidth to flush them to main memory becomes a bottleneck, so I think we're going to see more and more cores/chip. As that marches on, I think it's going to trickle down to even the low end of CPUs. For instance, you might even be able to buy a bunch of 64-core chips which have a bunch of cores disabled really cheap, because the disabled cores failed factory testing and were switched off. It can't be sold for full price any more, but that doesn't mean it's useless.
And once your $5 CPUs have 32 cores, well, providing the tooling is there, you might as well use a framework that makes use of them.
"many of them just run a browser and Excel."
Bad choice of examples there, I think. Browsers can be pretty multi-process heavy these days, with one main process, plus one per tab, plus extra processes for e.g. decoding streaming video in the tab, or running your (spit) EME plugins (spit) in a sandbox.
Similarly, with Excel, sure most of the time it doesn't do much. But, if you've got a spreadsheet with a bunch of dependent cells/formulas, then if someone updates the right cell, being massively parallel could really speed up value recalculations and propagation throughout the sheet. Some spreadsheets translate really well to map/reduce, and using all the cores could really help there.