Microsoft Predictions for 2008: Games group housecleaning continues (Microsoft in 2008: 10 Predictions)

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"Now lets for the purposes of this discussion say I have more than 2 cores and open a multi threaded program that handles itself in a more parallel fashion. Its threads could end up on the same core in silly orders."

Possibly, although you can set the affinity and the OS will usually honor it.

"And yes if you want to take advantage of parallelism you halve to share resources and shoot info every which way."

I disagree. Many tasks don't need to share resources - and those that do share a lot of resource may not be as suited for parallelism as you think they are, and may be better left as a single thread or divided at a different level.

Let's say I'm applying an effect to an image. I can have each core handle a different part of the image - if I have two cores, for example, one core can work on the top half, while the other core works on the bottom half. Since they are never reading or writing to the same pixels, they don't need to worry about all of that communication stuff.

Now I understand that it's not that easy for a lot of tasks, but my point is that not all tasks require such heavy communication.

"The more my program takes advantage of thread in a manner threads weren't ever designed to be used, the more wacky windows can get with the logistics."

Well the solution for that is simple: Don't use threads in ways they're not designed for! Keep it a single thread if it's too complex to multi thread - chances are it didn't need to be multi threaded anyways.

"Whats the point of having eight cores if your just "Time slicing" Your time slicing 8 times as fast yes, but thats not parallel processing. Its not even really multitasking."

I don't know the details of how Windows manages time slices and multiple cores - but I imagine the engineers at Microsoft are not so stupid they'd give only one application a piece of time when there are multiple cores. I imagine that scheduler is intelligent enough to detect multiple cores, and allows multiple threads to have a slice of time given they are on separate cores - or something similar.

Posted by: CobraA1   Posted on: 12/20/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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