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Who Needs Massively Multi-core?

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Greg Linden

November 5, 2009

Do consumers want massively multi-core?  Or would they rather have lower power consumption and better memory bandwidth?  Are we building what people want?

User Comments

 (3)

Having more cores per chip does not necessarily means we need to use them all. Here is a possible scenario. When the temperature of a core increases, usually the system will lower frequency and/or voltage of that core in order to avoid hotspots. We will feel a slowdown. On the other hand if we have idle cores, we can "migrate" the thread from the heated core to that idle one.

   — Mohamed Zahran, November 12, 2009

Maybe not 64 cores, but Intel had increased energy efficiency with the dual core tecnology. Lower clocks generate less heat.

But sometimes it looks like they forgot that some problems are intrinsically sequential.

   — Ricardo Cillo, November 24, 2009

I think the STM vs. message passing vs lock/semaphore/mutex debate is pretty unsettled. There's the STM (haskell, clojure) vs. erlang /scala message passing camps:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/Technology/Concurrency/

http://www.sauria.com/blog/2009/10/05/the-cambrian-period-of-concurrency/

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/5c7a962cc72c1fe7?hl=en

http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/pdf/36_Click_fastbcs.pdf

   — gene tani, January 24, 2010
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