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RE: Just as pointless as the mhz war
By kkwst2 on 4/23/2009 1:43:04 PM , Rating: 3
But that's exactly HIS point. He's saying that once we hit the core wall it will force some other innovation in how to scale performance and then we'll beat that horse to death and continue to improve performance.

That's how it works. We keep pushing current technology until there's a need to do something differently. It's only when we hit the wall that people really start trying to think outside the box and more importantly that the people making the architecture decisions (which usually aren't the same as the people innovating) start listening.

They've been saying for years that we're going to hit a wall, but each time someone comes up with a way around it. Now maybe we will hit one eventually, but I'm betting it won't be next year.

Memory bandwidth has been dramatically improved with Nehalem. It should scale pretty well to 12 cores. My applications scale pretty well to 8 cores on Nehalem (Xeon) - much better than the previous architecture. It's certainly not like they don't understand the problems of core scaling and they're doing things to try to solve those issues.

RE: Just as pointless as the mhz war
By omnicronx on 4/23/2009 1:48:23 PM , Rating: 2
And I agree, but we won't see the benefit in the desktop world for some time to come. We've already had the MHZ war, then the war of the cores, now both Intel and AMD have on die memory controllers, they are kind of running out of options. My guess is on die memory controller per core, not shared per chip, but that won't reach the desktop market for some time, its just too expensive (nor is it currently needed).
How many times must I say its not merely the bandwidth, latency is disgustingly high the more cores you go. Just think about how complex it is to split a job between four cores using a shared memory controller let alone 12.

RE: Just as pointless as the mhz war






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