[url]http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10372095-264.html[/url]
Wait, Win7 supports 256 processors? :aaa:
[quote]It's a question we all face: with chips getting more processing cores instead of more gigahertz, is your next computer going to actually run your software faster?
Microsoft is one of the companies that feels the pressure to most acutely when it comes to putting those cores to work. Though it doesn't pretend to have the problem licked, Microsoft does believe Windows 7 provides a better foundation for using multicore systems than earlier versions of the operating system.
One key part of solving the PC's multicore problems draws from the world of big iron, and Windows 7 can support much bigger iron--servers with as many as 256 processor cores compared with 64 for its predecessor. Now a few years into the multicore era, even today's laptops are able to juggle as many tasks as reasonably powerful servers from just a few years ago. Intel's new Core i7 "Clarksfield" processor for mobile computers has four cores that manage a total of eight separate "threads" of work.
"One dimension is support for a much larger number of processors and getting good linear scaling on that change from 64 to 256 processors," said Jon DeVaan, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division. "There's all kinds of depth in that change."
Linear scaling means that doubling the number of processors means a doubling in performance--something rarely achieved in real-world computing. But what does 256 or even 64 processors have to do with a PC with four or eight cores? In short, updating the Windows plumbing to support bigger servers also helps work run more smoothly on smaller multicore machines, for example by ensuring data cached in memory is close on hand to the processor core that needs it, DeVaan said.
It's crucial that Microsoft help solve multicore issues. The company is responsible not just for the most widely used personal-computer operating system but also for the programming tools many use to create the software that runs on it. That's why another broad attempt to ease multicore pains takes place within Visual Studio 2010, the upcoming version of Microsoft's programming tools.
"People have been working on this for a long time. So far there haven't been any magic bullets," Devaan said. "The commercial reality is creating a lot more urgency now, so I think we'll see a lot more approaches taken."
Unlocking multicore power is a point of competition, too: Apple's newest version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, adds a facility called Grand Central Dispatch to centralize management of all the various threads of programs as they run on a system.
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices bear responsibility, too, since they embraced multicore designs once heat problems put an end to the clock-frequency race, but Microsoft has much more clout in developer relations.
Multicore designs can help easily when people are running many separate programs or when running programs that are "embarrassingly parallel"--in other words, when a task has many naturally independent subtasks, such as rendering each of a video's many frames. But many programs won't easily make the jump to a parallel design when they're set up as a single sequence of steps today.
"An operating system is never going to be able to take an application that isn't already parallel and make it so. Developers still need to multi-thread their apps," said Evans Data analyst Janel Garvin. [/quote]
ogod
What happens to PCs with one core though?
[QUOTE=Dr Egg;17841999]What happens to PCs with one core though?[/QUOTE]
They got replaced by multi-core.
[QUOTE=imadaman;17841332]Wait, Win7 supports 256 processors? :aaa:[/QUOTE]
With today's strain on servers I'm not surprised at all.
Still a bit behind in the whole server market considering some versions of Linux support virtually infinite amounts of processors.
[editline]01:48PM[/editline]
Not that it's very practical of course
I love how MS put artificial limits on their OS so when they release a new version, they raise it a bit more to make people think they are awesome, the OS is easily capable of supporting an unlimited amount of CPU's anyway so why lock it to 256 even if that is alot.
[QUOTE=Dr Egg;17841999]What happens to PCs with one core though?[/QUOTE]
They get yelled at by Vista and Windows 7 fanboys because their PC is apparently not good enough to run the OS.
They're already fucked, anyway. One core already makes it a pain to do a lot of things.
When I built a new computer I noticed an increase in speed loading stuff.
[QUOTE=Dr Egg;17841999]What happens to PCs with one core though?[/QUOTE]
Single core CPUs are a rare sighting these days.
Regardless of what's mainstream, single-core PCs shouldn't be affected, as the scale would most likely start at one, not two...
[QUOTE=Xplodzion;17843489]I love how MS put artificial limits on their OS so when they release a new version, they raise it a bit more to make people think they are awesome, the OS is easily capable of supporting an unlimited amount of CPU's anyway so why lock it to 256 even if that is alot.[/QUOTE]
It's probably an issue with stability so they capped it, think of putting 1000 cannons on a ship
I think if you put 1000 cannons on anything you'd rape everything ever.
[QUOTE=Kondor;17844568]It's probably an issue with stability so they capped it, think of putting 1000 cannons on a ship[/QUOTE]
For the wrong definition of stability.
Really, it's not an issue of stability. Probably only scalability. If you've got all these processors you want to assign tasks to, then you need to be able to determine what tasks you want to give to which processor, how long you expect them to work on it, what resource dependencies are shared across multiple tasks so they can at least share some of the L2 cache. It is basically a big juggling problem, and right now, they only have 8 bits to address a CPU. They don't really need any more than that, and it is juggling a lot more metrics around than just the id of the CPU to run a task. Things get especially complicated if these CPUs aren't symmetric, which is a distinct contingency they have to work around with a multi-core scheduler. They just require some upper bound on the complexity of the problem so they can have the CPU doing the stuff it is asked to do, instead of needing to waste all its resources managing its resources. There'd be a certain level of irony in that...
Wow heres me thinking that the most proccesors ever made was 16 lol imagine 1000 processors working on 1 game lol
[QUOTE=falkflyer;17844742]I think if you put 1000 cannons on anything you'd rape everything ever.[/QUOTE]
Yeah when your ship is 1000 feet beneath the sea
[QUOTE=Rombishead;17844935]Wow heres me thinking that the most proccesors ever made was 16 lol imagine 1000 processors working on 1 game lol[/QUOTE]
lol omg dat would b liek rl grafix???
[QUOTE=Rombishead;17844935]Wow heres me thinking that the most proccesors ever made was 16 lol imagine 1000 processors working on 1 game lol[/QUOTE]
[I]That's not how things scale.[/I] Did you read the OP? It kinda outlined the scalability problem with software moving to a massively parallelized hardware solution.
[QUOTE=imadaman;17841332]
Wait, Win7 supports 256 processors? :aaa:[/QUOTE]
Yeah Microsoft only supports what they can test. They tested a machine with 256 cores and 196GB of RAM (may be two different machines).
[QUOTE=Rombishead;17844935]Wow heres me thinking that the most proccesors ever made was 16 lol imagine 1000 processors working on 1 game lol[/QUOTE]
Ignoring the chatspeak, you'd have to program the game to even be able to run on more than one core simultaneously.
Edit: Gah, ninja'd.
[QUOTE=Dr Egg;17841999]What happens to PCs with one core though?[/QUOTE]
Well, the Pentium 4 uses hyperthreading, 2 threads, so i would think it would work fine. Pentium 4 would be the only chip anybody today would use, i don't know anybody who uses a pentium 3 and below. However, i don't know about the AMD side.
[QUOTE=devvothechav;17845555]Well, the Pentium 4 uses hyperthreading, 2 threads, so i would think it would work fine. Pentium 4 would be the only chip anybody today would use, i don't know anybody who uses a pentium 3 and below. However, i don't know about the AMD side.[/QUOTE]
This is a non-issue. Of course Win7 needs to be operable on single-threaded CPUs. They want to expand on mobile markets and Atom, and hyperthreading adds a good 40-50% power consumption overhead. All this is saying is that we want to divide the work relatively equally across n processing units, for n from 1 to 256. It's not like they designed it specifically to work with a specific number.
[QUOTE=people]rah rah long live multicore[/QUOTE]
My netbook only has hyper threading. I've heard Win 7 is better with HT than any other Win OS, but since Win 7 is being touted as a netbook OS, having it not run well on a single core system is retarded.
[editline]10:39PM[/editline]
[QUOTE=gparent;17843836]They get yelled at by Vista and Windows 7 fanboys because their PC is apparently not good enough to run the OS.
They're already fucked, anyway. One core already makes it a pain to do a lot of things.[/QUOTE]
Yeah I've heard Vista grinds to a halt when you apply updates on a single core system.
[editline]10:39PM[/editline]
which is totally acceptable
[editline]10:40PM[/editline]
not
They need some way of scaling a single, non-multithreaded program over more than one CPU/core. That could easily make things seem faster.
[QUOTE=Panda X;17845265]Yeah Microsoft only supports what they can test. They tested a machine with 256 cores and 196GB of RAM (may be two different machines).[/QUOTE]
With some proper RAID, that would be a wonderful computer to use.
(Imagine folding...)
What's the point of having multiple cores with lower ghz in the end? I mean, that 1000 core cpu wouldn't have more than 5ghz to be honest, otherwise, HOW WOULD YOU BE ABLE TO FUCKING COOL IT?! I mean, even if you cool it with liquid metal or even liquid nitrogen, it wouldn't be cool enough to run stable for more than a few seconds.
I mean, let's say a single core produces like 50°C, that multiply 1000... that's 5000°C. Our Sun has a max. temperature of 5778°C. So, everyone just standing like a trillion(?) light years next to it would instantly go *puff*.
[QUOTE=Torekk;17857573]What's the point of having multiple cores with lower ghz in the end? I mean, that 1000 core cpu wouldn't have more than 5ghz to be honest, otherwise, HOW WOULD YOU BE ABLE TO FUCKING COOL IT?! I mean, even if you cool it with liquid metal or even liquid nitrogen, it wouldn't be cool enough to run stable for more than a few seconds.
I mean, let's say a single core produces like 50°C, that multiply 1000... that's 5000°C. Our Sun has a max. temperature of 5778°C. So, everyone just standing like a trillion(?) light years next to it would instantly go *puff*.[/QUOTE]
:downs:
[QUOTE=gparent;17843836]They get yelled at by Vista and Windows 7 fanboys because their PC is apparently not good enough to run the OS.
They're already fucked, anyway. One core already makes it a pain to do a lot of things.[/QUOTE]
"I believe technology shouldn't move forward to support shitboxes from before the turn of the millennium" -gparent 2009
I you don't own software that supports/optimizes multicore support (i.e CS:S), it doesn't care if you got 4 billions of CPU's altogether. It would be using just 1.
[QUOTE=Xplodzion;17843489]I love how MS put artificial limits on their OS so when they release a new version, they raise it a bit more to make people think they are awesome, the OS is easily capable of supporting an unlimited amount of CPU's anyway so why lock it to 256 even if that is alot.[/QUOTE]
Linux also supports only limited number of CPUs. Depending on architecture, configuration and version, it ranges from just 32 to 8192.
Supporting more processors does slow things down if those processors don't exist. On Linux, at least, adding a supported processor adds about 8kb to the kernel image, and sucks up a bit of memory as well. The main problem is the scheduler using bigger numbers for "processor id", which can use up another good bit of RAM. There are valid reasons for limiting the number of processors to whatever is reasonable.
Wow, I never thought I would be defending Microsoft.
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