Results 1 to 15 of 15

Thread: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

  1. #1
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Posts
    1,764
    Thanks
    101
    Thanked
    74 times in 67 posts
    • pp05's system
      • Motherboard:
      • AsRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming itx
      • CPU:
      • Ryzen 3 2200G
      • Memory:
      • Ballistix Elite 8GB Kit 3200 UDIMM
      • Storage:
      • Kingston 240gb SSD
      • PSU:
      • Kolink SFX 350W PSU
      • Case:
      • Kolink Sattelite plus MITX
      • Operating System:
      • Windows 10

    How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    Would I be right in saying there is a gap in terms of processing power available to general public and software developed to take advantage of it?

    The future is multi-core - there is no doubt about this. Typically today one asks the question should one go quad core or dual core. The benefit of the former is mute for anything beyond encoding/video related/web server/ and scientific stuff. The former is merely future proofing.

    Gaming is slowly making a move towards it, but generally no applications that the average non-specialized system user will be using to take advantage of it.

    For those with or going with dual cores today - how long does everyone think they will be okay before they too will will need to upgrade to multi-core. 2 years? Sooner..?
    Last edited by pp05; 07-10-2009 at 05:14 PM.

  2. #2
    Anthropomorphic Personification shaithis's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 2004
    Location
    The Last Aerie
    Posts
    10,857
    Thanks
    645
    Thanked
    872 times in 736 posts
    • shaithis's system
      • Motherboard:
      • Asus P8Z77 WS
      • CPU:
      • i7 3770k @ 4.5GHz
      • Memory:
      • 32GB HyperX 1866
      • Storage:
      • Lots!
      • Graphics card(s):
      • Sapphire Fury X
      • PSU:
      • Corsair HX850
      • Case:
      • Corsair 600T (White)
      • Operating System:
      • Windows 10 x64
      • Monitor(s):
      • 2 x Dell 3007
      • Internet:
      • Zen 80Mb Fibre

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    Dual Core will remain fine for the vast majoirty of users IMO.

    More and more the shift is being made to offload as much as possible onto the video card and even the processes that make seriously good use of multi-cores (rendering, video encoding etc) will probably start to shift towards the video card for even faster number crunching.

    Basically, anything that can take advantage of multiple threads will be a candidate for GPGPU, the rest doesn't need multiple cores.
    Main PC: Asus Rampage IV Extreme / 3960X@4.5GHz / Antec H1200 Pro / 32GB DDR3-1866 Quad Channel / Sapphire Fury X / Areca 1680 / 850W EVGA SuperNOVA Gold 2 / Corsair 600T / 2x Dell 3007 / 4 x 250GB SSD + 2 x 80GB SSD / 4 x 1TB HDD (RAID 10) / Windows 10 Pro, Yosemite & Ubuntu
    HTPC: AsRock Z77 Pro 4 / 3770K@4.2GHz / 24GB / GTX 1080 / SST-LC20 / Antec TP-550 / Hisense 65k5510 4K TV / HTC Vive / 2 x 240GB SSD + 12TB HDD Space / Race Seat / Logitech G29 / Win 10 Pro
    HTPC2: Asus AM1I-A / 5150 / 4GB / Corsair Force 3 240GB / Silverstone SST-ML05B + ST30SF / Samsung UE60H6200 TV / Windows 10 Pro
    Spare/Loaner: Gigabyte EX58-UD5 / i950 / 12GB / HD7870 / Corsair 300R / Silverpower 700W modular
    NAS 1: HP N40L / 12GB ECC RAM / 2 x 3TB Arrays || NAS 2: Dell PowerEdge T110 II / 24GB ECC RAM / 2 x 3TB Hybrid arrays || Network:Buffalo WZR-1166DHP w/DD-WRT + HP ProCurve 1800-24G
    Laptop: Dell Precision 5510 Printer: HP CP1515n || Phone: Huawei P30 || Other: Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Pro 10.1 CM14 / Playstation 4 + G29 + 2TB Hybrid drive

  3. #3
    Registered+
    Join Date
    Oct 2009
    Posts
    24
    Thanks
    0
    Thanked
    2 times in 2 posts

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    I think unless you have particular high performance needs, you're likely to be fine for quite a while yet, and as shaithis says, a lot of what you might need this for is getting offloaded to the GPU. Support for the complex task of producing parallel processing code is improving (Microsoft's Visual Studio 10 is going to bring this more widely available), but I think it's going to take time to filter down into lots of software that makes so much use of it you have to have a quad core, and even then it'll probably be a fairly limited subset of applications. (Oh, and probably some future version of Windows that will chew up even more of your CPU for nothing in particular!)

  4. #4
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Aug 2005
    Posts
    1,527
    Thanks
    18
    Thanked
    75 times in 62 posts
    • lodore's system
      • Motherboard:
      • X570 AORUS MASTER
      • CPU:
      • Amd Ryzen 5900x
      • Memory:
      • 32GB DDR4 2666 Mhz
      • Storage:
      • 1TB Gigabyte AORUS 7000s SSD and sandisk 1tb sata 3
      • Graphics card(s):
      • EVGA 1080TI 11gb
      • PSU:
      • Ion+ 860W
      • Case:
      • Corsair 4000D AIRFLOW
      • Operating System:
      • Windows 10 pro 64bit
      • Monitor(s):
      • Iiyama 34inch ultra wide quad HD 144hz and 24inch asus HD
      • Internet:
      • 80Mbps Zen

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    surely if you can scale to two you can scale to 4 or 6 or 8 etc?
    im not a programmer so I dont know.

  5. #5
    Registered+
    Join Date
    Oct 2009
    Posts
    24
    Thanks
    0
    Thanked
    2 times in 2 posts

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    Quote Originally Posted by lodore View Post
    surely if you can scale to two you can scale to 4 or 6 or 8 etc?
    im not a programmer so I dont know.
    It depends on the task. Some things have more scope for parallelising (sorry!) than others. Particularly tasks that do the same thing lots of times on multiple bits of data with little or no interaction from the results of each bit of data can be nicely farmed out to 4 or 6 or however many hundred you might have in a GPU. If there's little or no communication required between the different tasks, it goes by the nice name of "embarrassingly parallel" Perhaps unsurprisingly, 3D projection falls into this category as you can map each pixel independently.

  6. #6
    Seething Cauldron of Hatred TheAnimus's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2005
    Posts
    17,164
    Thanks
    803
    Thanked
    2,152 times in 1,408 posts

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    Quote Originally Posted by shaithis View Post
    More and more the shift is being made to offload as much as possible onto the video card and even the processes that make seriously good use of multi-cores (rendering, video encoding etc) will probably start to shift towards the video card for even faster number crunching.

    Basically, anything that can take advantage of multiple threads will be a candidate for GPGPU, the rest doesn't need multiple cores.
    It really depends, GPGPU is good for some things, but it is still not a competitor to CPU for a LOT of things.

    Video compression for instance is often made a hell of a lot better yes, but just take the simple case of where most applications bottleneck right now, its on the IO throughput, even those people with the fancy 200Meg/sec SSDs are having issues that apps will still wait on how files are handled, this is because of old programming models.

    When you profile something its often a case that the app spends a lot of time in a blocked state on IO requests.

    This is due to a lot of developers using old procedural ideas, everything is like a linear flow chart.

    When really you need to break these down further, we are seeing a return to SmallTalk with a fancy wrapper, be it in GUI design patterns like MVVM, which encourage an asynchronous model of communication, or even just in people using a functional approach with things like LINQ in .Net.

    Then people can use ideas like PLINQ to automatically load balance their apps, by this i mean, say you've got a quad core, but there are 3 apps running, how many threads should you be using? Really such a decision should be handled in a lower level than your app (IE the OS or Framework, there is good debate as to where!).

    So there are technologies that are helping to simplify, but given how expensive it is to develop properly using these things, and how most applications have millions of bytes of legacy code, its not going to happen overnight.
    throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)

  7. #7
    Seething Cauldron of Hatred TheAnimus's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2005
    Posts
    17,164
    Thanks
    803
    Thanked
    2,152 times in 1,408 posts

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    I now want to post more of a rant about how GPGPU is just not all people are saying it is, in the financial technology industry, people are saying "oh you do your monte carlo sims on them" and other such bollocks without thinking.

    First off most of the maths libraries required for these sims have been written over 15 years, thats if your lucky, sometimes its more. Its quite common for them to be using two different versions of the crt library, which creates so much fun with lack of consistency etc. But the cost of re-writing them would be in the high tens of millions in dev time, let alone the risk of new bugs been created.

    As such the only sims you can releasiticaly afford to implement is the vanilla stuff, guess what? That gets churned through nice and quick on any x64 chip of the last 2 years. So that begs the question why spend the extra money in developing in a language which is highly proprietary (ie your locked in to NVidia) and expensive to find devs in? All of a sudden C#/F# look incredibly attractive.

    Then you look at the hardware, most farms are about 10-20 agents. Wow, massive saving to be had there. But when you look at the problem (esp considering the whole law of deminishing returns) we see that half the time its shifting the data around thats the problem. A cunning use of a SAN or PCIe SSD device will provide a bigger increase in computing power.

    Yes NVidia have done a lot of good work, making their cards not suck at branching, but it is just all to often advocated as "the next big thing", by people who have no idea of the problem domain they are advocating its use in!
    throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)

  8. #8
    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2005
    Posts
    30,748
    Thanks
    1,787
    Thanked
    3,286 times in 2,647 posts
    • kalniel's system
      • Motherboard:
      • Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Ultra
      • CPU:
      • Intel i9 9900k
      • Memory:
      • 32GB DDR4 3200 CL16
      • Storage:
      • 1TB Samsung 970Evo+ NVMe
      • Graphics card(s):
      • nVidia GTX 1060 6GB
      • PSU:
      • Seasonic 600W
      • Case:
      • Cooler Master HAF 912
      • Operating System:
      • Win 10 Pro x64
      • Monitor(s):
      • Dell S2721DGF
      • Internet:
      • rubbish

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    Quote Originally Posted by TheAnimus View Post
    As such the only sims you can releasiticaly afford to implement is the vanilla stuff, guess what? That gets churned through nice and quick on any x64 chip of the last 2 years. So that begs the question why spend the extra money in developing in a language which is highly proprietary (ie your locked in to NVidia) and expensive to find devs in? All of a sudden C#/F# look incredibly attractive.
    Which is presumably why you can code for fermi in C++ now, without needing to develop in a highly proprietary language.

    But the larrabbee x86 instruction set will be nice.

  9. #9
    Seething Cauldron of Hatred TheAnimus's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2005
    Posts
    17,164
    Thanks
    803
    Thanked
    2,152 times in 1,408 posts

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    Theres coding in the same langauge, and actually been able to utalise the hardware properly.

    what I call unix syndrome, because all of the 50 year old beardie weridies do it, is to say parrallisation happens when you start 4 process which have minimal intercommunication (all socket based so they can be split across machines etc) with no thought. They fork() when they should pthread()

    What makes efficient multi-threading design hard, is working out where the common areas are, and where the bottlenecks are likely to be. You should be able to share heap data, this is good because even if you have the same heap data from a fork, it will be replicated twice, and cache will be changed on the CPU when its already the right cache.... This is a classic example of how people shoot themselfs in the foot i've seen done in many a institute.

    The fact is many people have domain knowledge, but aren't full fledged devs, as such you need to take all of these considerations out of their hands. C++ is a fricken awful language for wrting multi-threaded apps in period. It has no real functional constructs, and you always end up with people flogging frameworks on the top (in which case, you might as well use an esoteric langauge).
    throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)

  10. #10
    Technojunkie
    Join Date
    May 2004
    Location
    Up North
    Posts
    2,580
    Thanks
    239
    Thanked
    213 times in 138 posts

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    Massively parallel (hundreds of cores/nodes) has always been stated to be the future of computing.

    It's a long time coming though, as incremental development (intel) gets better short term results and better backward compatibility - not to mention lower risk.

    Ivor Catt (visionary or loon?) has some good articles on his struggle to get WSI adopted,
    which would be the first stage to affordable parallel processing.

  11. #11
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Sep 2009
    Location
    Bolton
    Posts
    324
    Thanks
    6
    Thanked
    27 times in 23 posts
    • Syllopsium's system
      • Motherboard:
      • D975XBX2
      • CPU:
      • Q6700
      • Memory:
      • 8GB ECC DDR2 667
      • Storage:
      • 500GB
      • Graphics card(s):
      • 8800GTX and 7600GT - four monitors
      • PSU:
      • 600W Seasonic S12
      • Case:
      • Coolermaster Stacker
      • Operating System:
      • Vista x64, OpenBSD
      • Monitor(s):
      • 2 IBM C220p 22" CRT, one 17" VP730 TFT, one Zalman Trimon 19" 3D monitor
      • Internet:
      • 12Mb Be Internet

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    I'm already using multicore by running VMs on my main system.

    However, for most activities other than video encoding/transcoding, rendering etc dual core is more than adequate.

    I doubt I'll be upgrading from a Q6700 any time soon.

    PK

  12. #12
    Banned
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
    Posts
    2,129
    Thanks
    13
    Thanked
    189 times in 160 posts

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    http://www.uruk.org/emu/Taos.html

    People were doing this years ago, just no-one was really interested.

  13. #13
    Admin (Ret'd)
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Posts
    18,481
    Thanks
    1,016
    Thanked
    3,208 times in 2,281 posts

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    I'm not convinced software will ever catch up with processing power, short of a radical revolution of some type. But it used to be the other way round, where there were software tasks that weren't practical because of lack of processing power. Anyone use AutoCAD in the early days, with even wireframe models taking an age to redraw, let alone rendered ones, unless you had high-end PCs? Another example was voice recognition - that only really became viable to a decent standard fairly recently, by which I mean at about the 1.4GHz mark. Before that it was .... erm .... problematic.

    As for dual v quad, my feeling is that for the vast majority of people, it makes little difference to what they use a PC for, and nor does i5/i7, or top-end premium processors. Sure, there are tasks where it does, and if your objective is high benchmark scores, then it does. But personally, for my web browsing, accounting, WP, spreadsheet work, it makes NO difference to me, and even for editing large photos, it's not huge.

    With very limited exceptions, I can't see what is going to challenge the power of even mid-range processors from the last generation, let alone i5/i7 and DDR3 machines. Which is why my last purchase was S775, not Nehalem. I couldn't see why the price difference was justified, and certainly not to me.

    For me, hardware choices are all about the priceerformance ratio, at the margin. When the cost of an extra unit of whatever (performance, hard disk size, etc) starts to increase too much, that's where I stop. For instance, when I bought my last hard drives, 640GB was the sweet spot, though it's probably higher than that now. I just won't pay a price/unit premium to get the latest/greatest/fastest because I can't see the point.

  14. #14
    HEXUS.timelord. Zak33's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Location
    I'm a Jessie
    Posts
    35,157
    Thanks
    3,105
    Thanked
    3,138 times in 1,916 posts
    • Zak33's system
      • Storage:
      • Kingston HyperX SSD, Hitachi 1Tb
      • Graphics card(s):
      • Nvidia 1050
      • PSU:
      • Coolermaster 800w
      • Case:
      • Silverstone Fortress FT01
      • Operating System:
      • Win10
      • Internet:
      • Zen FTC uber speedy

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    Quote Originally Posted by TheAnimus View Post
    First off most of the maths libraries required for these sims have been written over 15 years, thats if your lucky, sometimes its more. Its quite common for them to be using two different versions of the crt library, which creates so much fun with lack of consistency etc. But the cost of re-writing them would be in the high tens of millions in dev time, let alone the risk of new bugs been created.

    As such the only sims you can releasiticaly afford to implement is the vanilla stuff, guess what? That gets churned through nice and quick on any x64 chip of the last 2 years. So that begs the question why spend the extra money in developing in a language which is highly proprietary (ie your locked in to NVidia) and expensive to find devs in? All of a sudden C#/F# look incredibly attractive.
    most of what you (I'm sure brilliantly) describe, is over my head... but I Do know that Direct Hex works in a room full of monster number crunching server racks, that towered over me.. and he has one with AMD A64 Opteron's in, that just kick arse on certain computational calculations.. and of course... I don't understand which ones, or what he was on about, but it did impress on me the importance of having the right CPU/GPU for the right job.

    And he liked showing it to me

    Quote Originally Posted by Advice Trinity by Knoxville
    "The second you aren't paying attention to the tool you're using, it will take your fingers from you. It does not know sympathy." |
    "If you don't gaffer it, it will gaffer you" | "Belt and braces"

  15. #15
    Seething Cauldron of Hatred TheAnimus's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2005
    Posts
    17,164
    Thanks
    803
    Thanked
    2,152 times in 1,408 posts

    Re: How Long Before Software Catches Up Processing Power?

    Indeed hex stuff is ultra hardcore, but as a result represents 0.5% of the industry practice.
    throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Similar Threads

  1. Replies: 23
    Last Post: 18-06-2007, 08:31 AM
  2. Broadband Speed and Power Supplies
    By Tanzy in forum Networking and Broadband
    Replies: 0
    Last Post: 10-02-2006, 01:45 PM
  3. Software devs still not doing their jobs right!
    By aidanjt in forum PC Hardware and Components
    Replies: 46
    Last Post: 08-08-2005, 06:54 PM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •