IraSeigel
03-20-2008, 10:08 AM
With the news that Intel will be releasing quad- and 8-core chips for laptops soon, it occurred to me that I need some education on these chips.
My understanding is that, to take advantage of the additional cores, software has to be rewritten (recompiled, recoded, etc). I'd be interested to know what software, so far, has been rewritten.
But as the number of cores increase, does that mean that the software needs to be continually "adjusted" to take advantage of these extra cores? Since recoding is a time- and labor-intensive effort, how many companies will undertake this expensive task, and how often, to keep up with the ever-increasing number of cores?
I understand that the CPU makers are pretty much at the end of their ability to increase clock speeds, due to increasing heat accumulations and power requirements. It was also easy to understand how increasing clock speed would increase the overall speed of the operations of the software.
But with multi-core chips, are the additional cores more of a marketing tool than an actual improvement in operation? Is 8 cores really "faster" than 2? Will SAW, or Photoshop or Premier, etc., run "better" on more cores? Or is all of this basically hype, replacing clock speed with numbers of cores, in the computer makers' efforts to get us to continually upgrade?
Maybe gamers will see improvements using multiple cores; will the rest of us?
Thanks,
Ira
My understanding is that, to take advantage of the additional cores, software has to be rewritten (recompiled, recoded, etc). I'd be interested to know what software, so far, has been rewritten.
But as the number of cores increase, does that mean that the software needs to be continually "adjusted" to take advantage of these extra cores? Since recoding is a time- and labor-intensive effort, how many companies will undertake this expensive task, and how often, to keep up with the ever-increasing number of cores?
I understand that the CPU makers are pretty much at the end of their ability to increase clock speeds, due to increasing heat accumulations and power requirements. It was also easy to understand how increasing clock speed would increase the overall speed of the operations of the software.
But with multi-core chips, are the additional cores more of a marketing tool than an actual improvement in operation? Is 8 cores really "faster" than 2? Will SAW, or Photoshop or Premier, etc., run "better" on more cores? Or is all of this basically hype, replacing clock speed with numbers of cores, in the computer makers' efforts to get us to continually upgrade?
Maybe gamers will see improvements using multiple cores; will the rest of us?
Thanks,
Ira