Intel Not Going to Wait for Software to Catch Up

I have to agree with Intel on this. Forcing software companies to get up to speed is a good thing for all of us.

cool beans

This makes sense.. Playing catch up or even waiting for the software to catch up would also allow competition to catch up to them.. Besides staying ahead will always help system builders to build a literally future proof setup.. There exists only a spot of bother wherein the hardware might reach a saturation point beyond which the technology might mostly under perform due the lack of resources to utilize it efficiently..

Why cant nvidia have this mindset? cause we all want gpgpus dont we? oh wait I forgot... NO WE DONT! Good call Intel

Intel learned their lesson...so did ATI... Nvidia is learning it now.

Totally makes sense. Especially when everyone thinks this company or that company is holding down progression. They won't look like corporate monopolizers trying to make money by holding back technology. It will force software companies to compete to utilize the hardware they are being given.

can you still believe the i7 is years old? way to rock intel

If only AMD could compete on the same level. I'll keep on hoping

I was also thinking that with such fast processors and graphics cards we have today, to really make use of them to the fullest, we really need to start having decently priced SSD's, not only to store the OS, but everything else too. It's probably the major bottleneck in any given system. Even an old Pentium III at 1GHz benefits immensely if you give it a modern 7200rpm Hard drive with more data density per platter, so modern systems defintely need SSD's to bring the best in them. Storage systems have always lagged behind.

NOW that is an attitude i like to see more especially when it comes to Gaming... I hope developers are developing new stuff rather than sell the same old thing over and over and over and over again and again and again...

Oh god. Can you think about anything other than video cards?

hey you guys, don't knock developers, making a program efficient with that many threads isn't easy. In fact some problems can and will never be threaded (its impossible to do)

nice intel

i tihnk impossible is a word tossed around by ppl who dont want to know the power they have to change....(read this some where)

sooner or later some one will come and write a language that can thread anything i think...

PS: i dont know much abt programming

Intel should develop its moblin software or some linux derivative in parallel also, in that way M$ will be forced to catch up fast or else it will eat dust.

I'm not a programmer but can someone explain to me why is it taking so long for programmers to create software that can can take advantage of multi thread. Is it because of cost? is it hard to write code for it?

thanks

AMD is competing on the same level. No one gives them attention though. They currently have 12 core Opertons out and 16 core versions with smaller fabs are due this summer.

I think the development and progress is great but it seems it comes at a high price for consumers.

@AndrewCutter, some algorithms have actually been proven to be impossible to thread

@gekko668, it is very hard to write thread safe code and as i said above, some code is impossible to thread

personally, this is one of the things i work on in my spare time as i see it being one of the parts of programming that needs a lot of work right now

EDIT: this is what i go to for school, computer science

Ummm... Who care about intel when IBM is doing oh so much more!!! Every hear of Power7, guys???? It's an 8 core, 4 thread monster with edram L3 cache that makes it an absolute revolution in computing. Add in it's 256 way large SMP system design (model 795) and it's super computing use (wikipedia: "blue waters") and IBM clearly leads. And yes, it can play crysis!! Power powers all the game consoles and a version of Power7 will power the next gen MS and Sony consoles. Intel? Intel? Who cares!

You're smoking crack if you think M$ is going to make the mistake of using an underpowered in-order processor for the next xbox. Developers want to spend time making games, not compliling software builds over and over and over again to make the code run fast enough.

It can't possible go the other way around. Would you be expecting someone to create a program that was multi-threaded when there were no dual core CPU's available? No way. Software is always behind hardware.

lets face it, there will always be software requirements that can utilise the hardware as its created... 3D visualisation / cinema use for example, will always benefit from faster and faster render times.. we have in absolutely no way reached real time rednering for cinema graphics, or realtime raytracing... and thats just one area of high use computer software, I'm sure there are others in the science and medical professions.

So where's my 16core, 256 thread CPU?

Amd doesn't compete with intel on a performance level *except maybe servers not sure about those*, but on a performance/price level. I have nothing against AMD, and if they did manage to bring out something superior I would buy it if I needed it anyways.

And johnny really it doesn't come at an expense to most consumers. A core i7 920 would do most people fine, they don't need the super elite extreme cash hog cpu. And most don't even really need 920.

It helps more consumers then it hurts, as new things come out, old things price usually drop.

most consumers only need an athlon II x2 240 TBH, anything more than that is a waste for the majority of people

here on Tom's hardware, an i5-750 or PII x4 955 is plenty, there are few people who actually need the 8 threads of an i7 (or 12 for the 980X)

agreed that AMD doesn't perform on a pure performance level, though its plenty for most people (and can be a tad cheaper, but again, thats price/performance)

though as a developer, hardware companies pushing more performance gets me to want to make use of the hardware, so i don't mind it at all

[citation][nom]PowerGuy[/nom]Ummm... Who care about intel when IBM is doing oh so much more!!! Every hear of Power7, guys???? It's an 8 core, 4 thread monster with edram L3 cache that makes it an absolute revolution in computing. Add in it's 256 way large SMP system design (model 795) and it's super computing use (wikipedia: "blue waters") and IBM clearly leads. And yes, it can play crysis!! Power powers all the game consoles and a version of Power7 wi
okie, so I'm looking for a mainframe that will support 3 users working at the same time (multiseat config), can you supply me with a cpu of that kind, matching mb and 8 gb of ram at about 1.3k? thing it, that it is way expensive to buy. notice that at 900$ I can get the new amd opteron with 8 cores and the latest xeon quad from intel. not sure I can get that one at the same price, no to mention that I'm not sure if linux supports that cpu.

Thumbs up! I'm all for innovation and progress... So keep doing your thing intel, while the rest of us play catchup...

mindless, kingnoob:
You are right. The vast majority of computer users are simply appliance users. A $600 PC from a Big Box store is all they will ever need. (And you pretty much do not see them posting here on a regular basis.)

I have no problems with that. It helps drive down the cost of hardware for the rest of us. But we are enthusiasts. And if you weren't, you wouldn't be posting here.

Well NVIDIA do have this mindset IMO. They are looking into the future and seeing GPGPU more widespread than it is now. Whether this future eventuates is anyone's guess, but it will certainly expand in niche markets such as render farms. Intel are seeing multi-core processors in the future instead. As far as consumer-grade hardware goes this is more likely to take off than GPGPU.




AMD have a 12-core processor already. So they are ahead of Intel in this ideology, although not always in actual performance.




Well since all languages are eventually translated into Assembly it really doesn't matter what you use as far as making multithreading possible. However, certain languages are easier. Note that some applications simply don't need to be threaded because the workload is either small (no or negligible performance benefit) or not conducive to being paralleled (requires too much serial execution, making parallelism too much effort for the potential benefits). Some things are inherently capable of being paralleled, such as ray tracing, where almost all computation can be done in threads that are completely independent of each other. Where threads depend on the output of other threads it becomes more messy.

Even I feel like my PhII 955 is already overkill for the gaming/apps that I do/use. Though my guess is that at least some of the people who buy parts that they don't need now will eventually need it in the future.