More processors

[Nyx]

Intel announces 4 core chips to out-do AMD. Is this a continuation of Moore's law into how many processors we can fit on a chip?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...hive/2006/02/11/BUGCOH6P2B1.DTL&type=business

 

[mendicitis]

i'll put this one right beside my 5 bladed gillette razor and four necked electric guitar.

 

[FreiDOg]

Intel announces 4 core chips to out-do AMD. Is this a continuation of Moore's law into how many processors we can fit on a chip?

At least for the imediate future, yes.
The problem is, the average user quickly runs out of uses for those cores.
2 cores is a nice touch, 4 cores is probably ostentatious, but as we see more and more applications take advantage of multicore chips, it might work out well.
For the life of me, I can't see any home user having a use for 8 or 16 or 32 cores in their computer.

I expect the desktop offerings to settle down to mostly 2 core chips, some 4 core, some single core.

 

[CmaN3]

I think they will continually get more and more. Becuase now, we are starting to optimize both cores. I imagine in the future, just as we starting to do now, games and other apps will become multi-threaded, and use all the cores. When applications are multi-threaded, then they will make CPU's with more cores, so that you can multitask better.

 

[drizzt81]

At least for the imediate future, yes.
The problem is, the average user quickly runs out of uses for those cores.
2 cores is a nice touch, 4 cores is probably ostentatious, but as we see more and more applications take advantage of multicore chips, it might work out well.
For the life of me, I can't see any home user having a use for 8 or 16 or 32 cores in their computer in the near term.

I expect the desktop offerings to settle down to mostly 2 core chips, some 4 core, some single core.

I fixed that for you.

 

[FreiDOg]

I fixed that for you.

Depends on what you mean by 'near term'
next 2-3 years? Not a chance
5 years? not likely
10 years? I'm starting to get on board, but rather skeptical.
20 years? most likely.


I'd expect the end of the silicon based microprocessor before I'd expect people to be making real use of 8 cores or more.


Most people (not saying your neccessarily included in the group) who preach of cores scaling to ad nauseum don't really understand the difficulty of scalling complex tasks to more than a few real worker threads.
There are tasks, like media encoding, that do parallelise well, but those will be badly memory bound unless the memory bus keeps up with the cores.

 

[ALYNCH75]

2 cores, 3 cores, 4 what is going on. We don't need all that power. There is no applicaiton that will use this for the home user. Gamming on the pc is getting downright outrageuos. Think about it you spend so much on a CPU you can get an xbox 360 or whatever the latest and greattest video game console is. You can easly carry your game system with you to a party or whatever. now the way these games for the pc are going you need a 300 dolalr video card every 2 to 4 years just to play a game. I think we all need a reality check. the games look just as good on console

 

[Darakian]

I want to be able to host a UT2k4 server, burn a DVD, play music, play a movie, play fear, render video, run a full system spyware scan, F@H, compute pi out to the 5 trillionth digit, run my background apps, and crack passwords all at the same time.
How many cores do I need?

 

[CmaN3]

I'd say 10 should do it. You forgot that you also want to play quake 4... Duh!

 

[Bona Fide]

This is exactly what everyone was saying when AMD and Intel announced their dual-socket Opterons and Xeons. No one expected to actually use up two entire cores. But lo and behold, SMP and SMT have become the cornerstone of workstation and server computing.

 

[noobtech]

2 cores, 3 cores, 4 what is going on. We don't need all that power. There is no applicaiton that will use this for the home user. Gamming on the pc is getting downright outrageuos. Think about it you spend so much on a CPU you can get an xbox 360 or whatever the latest and greattest video game console is. You can easly carry your game system with you to a party or whatever. now the way these games for the pc are going you need a 300 dolalr video card every 2 to 4 years just to play a game. I think we all need a reality check. the games look just as good on console

That is the most un-biased, realistic, smartest thing i've heard from anyone lately. You set me straight. Thanks.

 

[banGerprawN]

That is the most un-biased, realistic, smartest thing i've heard from anyone lately. You set me straight. Thanks.

I keekled.