On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 01:35:46PM -0800, aurora wrote:
Hello!
Just gone though an article via Slashdot titled "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" [http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm]. It argues that the continous CPU performance gain we've seen is finally over. And that future gain would primary be in the area of software concurrency taking advantage hyperthreading and multicore architectures.
It got most things right, AMD & Intel are moving towards multiple cores on a chip so programmers will adapt. I don't see this as a big deal, the current trend is rack farms of cheap boxes for heavy computing needs. Multi-core CPUs will help those kinds of applications more than single threaded ones. Existing threaded apps don't have to worry at all.
But my understanding is that the current Python VM is single-threaded internally, so even if the program creates multiple threads, just one core will be dividing its time between those "threads".
His picking on Intel to graph CPU speeds was a mistake (I'll be generous and not say deliberate). Intel screwed up and pursued a megahertz-at-all-costs strategy for marketing reasons. AMD didn't worry about MHz, just about CPUs that did more work and so AMD is eating Intel's lunch. Intel has abandoned their "faster" line of processors and is using their CPUs that are slower in MHz but get more work done. So the author's "MHz plateau" graph isn't all Moore's law breaking down, it is the result of Intel's marketing dept breaking down.
You may be right, but I agree with the thrust of the article that multicore
looks to be the new in thing at the moment.
Steve -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
