vizwhiz Posted August 4, 2008 Share Posted August 4, 2008 upgrade = downtime but The longer you wait The faster it will run read This http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/03/AR2008080302021.html?hpid=sec-tech .. (excerpt) First intended for graphics-intensive applications, such as games and other visually intensive programs, company officials said the multi-core approach could become the model for common desktop computers. Engineers expect it to be capable of processing about a trillion instructions a second. The first product based on Larrabee is expected in 2009 or 2010, and Intel officials anticipate that not long after 2010, there will be laptops running on chips with more than 10 cores. The drawback of the new approach is that it requires an equally dramatic shift in the software industry. Some experts, such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, initially expressed reservations because of the disruptive nature of the transition. To take advantage of a chip with many processors, software has to be broken into chunks of instructions that can run in parallel on multiple processors. So, a computer program that now consists of one set of sequential instructions would have to be parceled into two, four or more than 10 sets of instructions, depending on the number of cores, that can be run in parallel. Once chips with 10 cores reach consumer desktops, however, the entire corpus of the world's software may have to be rewritten to take advantage of the extra power. ** There is more To The article before and article This excerpt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BrianKitts Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 (edited) Top notch reporting there. I was shocked to check the date on the article and see that it really wasn't four years old!! Perhaps it would have made more sense as a ten core announcement but the majority of the article was about this crazy new "many-core" thingy Edited August 5, 2008 by BrianKitts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Bergeron Posted August 5, 2008 Share Posted August 5, 2008 my favorite quote: "If we kept going as we had been, the heat density on a chip would have equaled the surface of the sun." guess one would need an extra fan or two. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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