Intel: Software needs to heed Moore's Law

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Not that easy to do really.

No, I am not talking about the actual coding, I am talking about the fact that most tasks performed on a desktop PC are serial in nature.

Lets take a look at the most popular (often used) PC task, word processing. Now I don't care how fast the CPU is, it can only handle text as fast as I can bang on the keyboard. You can hang 10 CPUs out there and it won't make a bit of difference no matter how you write the code.

Well that isn't quite right, you could send the rendering engine to a different CPU but to the users eyes there wouldn't be a bit of difference. (A blink of the eye is a blink of the eye and thats how fast text appears.)

The other limitation is still file (hard drive) access. Again, all the CPUs in the world won't move data any faster on or off the hard drive.

Yes, there are some limited apps that could take advantage of it, say crunching a large data base or a spreadsheet, but you will only be able to crunch what is avaiable from the hard drive. Video and photo editing would surely benefit (until you run into moving data to/from the drive) but even then much if not most of it is serial in nature.

Yes multicore CPUs make sense in certain applications like servers, and they do help the user that has to have half a dozen or more apps going at the same time, but what I really see is both Intel and AMD trying to create a new market where one doesn't exist or nearly so.

Both have reached what they concede is the speed limits of CPU cores (for now) and their answer is multi-core CPUs. Unfortunately these CPUs are not going to give the user the same speed increase as would doubling the CPU clock speed.

Posted by: No_Ax_to_Grind   Posted on: 05/25/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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