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holy crap , seems science going to wrong direction !
by 0xFFC 12y ago
holy crap , seems science going to wrong direction !
- noobermin 12y agoReading his comment, he seems to be referring to normal users, not things like scientific cluster jobs. Still, I'm kind of upset with his comment.
- gamesbrainiac 12y agoIf you have a saved copy, could you just paste it as a edit to your comment? I'd definitely like to read it.
- vardump 12y agoWhy are you upset with it? Without having seen his comment, so far parallel computing has brought little to consumer end users. Out of that little, by far the most of the benefit is about graphics processing in GPUs.
- r00fus 12y agoHe also excluded ASICs and the like and focused on GP CPUs. Not sure why that'd upset you - what would you use a desktop (assuming x86 or x64) CPU to do that actually requires explicit parallelism?
- rasz_pl 12y agoWe dont need parallelism, we need performance. We have been sitting on 4GHz for the last 4 years now? Things like games require more and more cpu cycles, and the only way to add more is additional cores. Linus post reads like he thinks there is a choice between fast fat cores versus lot of thin ones. There is no choice, there are no 6-8GHz cpus around the corner. We are where we are and there is only one way to "progress".
- szatkus 12y agoI'm not sure what you mean. Intel's Core progressed about 30-50% per clock performance during last 4 years (Nehalem -> Haswell).
- qznc 12y agoI think robots are an interesting use case: Image/speech recognition, motion/task planning, etc. Lots of things to do in parallel in (soft) real time on a mobile device. How to do it is still very unclear and for experimentation you want general purpose processors.
- r00fus 12y agoFPGAs are programmable and faster that GP processors...
- fsloth 12y agoThe way I see it, from a practical point of view, usually the program does not need to execute faster than the user can issues modifications. Usually, the user does only a few tens of operations per minute maximum. There is no need for the processes to execute faster than that. Most stuff people generally do with computers are nowadays blazingly fast in single core. Of course, we can add architectural baggage to slow this to a crawl. Or ignore memory optimization, and waste most of the cycles for cache flushes, reads, writes, allocations, etc. Which do not magically go away once there are more cores... There is a time and place for multicore but that is not everyhwhere like Linus wrote.
- dagw 12y agoEven as someone who does large parallel cluster calculations I kind of agree with him. A CPU with 64 tiny cores and basically no cache will never be as useful to the vast majority of people as a CPU with 4 large cores and lots of cache, even if the 64 cores are in theory able to produce more flops. Also a lot of scientific computation is split up into lots of smaller jobs with each job running on 1-4 cores, rather than a a few jobs running on 64 cores. So even that won't benefit that much from a heavy focus parallelism. And the single jobs that are best parallelized across lots and lots of cores are almost always best handled by something like a GPU and CUDA, and so falls outside the domain of the Linux kernel.
- dagw 12y agoIt's interesting to note that "science" and scientific computing has been back and forth along this road several times already. Back when I started out it was much more common to have large single image machines with 64-512 cores each. Then clusters (image a Beowulf cluster of... and all that) became a thing and all of a sudden people where buying machines 1-4 cores. Then we started getting more and more cores, but even then rarely more than 24-48 cores. Now we're seeing a turn back down again with more and more people buying machines with 4-16 cores and bunch of coprocessor cards.
- 0xFFC 12y agoactually my comment was sarcastic ! I don't know why people down voted my comment