[Uncle Joe]

Originally Posted by BrianT

Joe, CPU power has elevated faster than anyone had a right to expect 5 years ago. We will be looking at 16 actual/32 virtual cores in off-the-shelf desktop machines in 12-18 months. An order of magnitude increase in CPU power over just a few years. The economy of scale for x86 CPUs is simply unassailable by more specialized hardware.

No hard feelings, but the one statement of yours quoted above does not give a lot of weight to the rest of your comments. Can you clarify a little, please? Thanks.

G'day,

No worries ... Clarification of my statement is "in order" ... I'm not sure that this is the proper "Thread" to express this mate ... nonetheless ... here goes "a bit" ... And it may be relative to how our industry is currently changing. Technology in general .... and here is some current feedback from companies like Intel or AMD.

"The economy of scale for x86 CPUs is simply unassailable by more specialized hardware."

Sorry ..

There is a clear and understandable opinion here that silicon-level integration of the CPU and other workload-specific accelerators is inevitable, that multiple homogeneous cores will become subservient to chips based on heterogeneous accelerators.

It has been clearly stated by gentlemen such as Phil Hester - AMD CTO (Chief Technology Officer) as the following:

"He reckons that a CPU-only architecture makes little or no sense any more when additional transistor and space budget can be allocated to accelerators that provide more performance for the typical user's intended workload."

Work Load ... In Audio Post these days .... because of HD and surround formats, we have to deal with extremely high track/channel counts, heavy Audio Processing, and integrated HD video. Seamlessly and quick --> as Post houses should & need to charge big dollars ! How do the current "cores" that you refer to hold up to this type of heavy processing environment ? At Fairlight, we heavily benchmark this ... they simply choke and gag mate !

132 Tracks of 32 bit Audio ... running maybe 3 to 6 Audio processing effects per channel + HD integrated Video. Question ... What system do you run mate ?

Companies like AMD clearly sees multiple processing cores on one die.

By their very nature, CPUs are excellent at processing code that has to be put through sequentially. The low-latency x86 architecture is fast but nonetheless narrow, as even the latest processors run with 'only' four execution units in parallel. And so what if it is 8 or 16 ? This is simply and indication why a CPU-only architecture is dead, because why wouldn't you integrate into everything all that's needed?

Damn ... I could go on for hours ! tutt

One last "food for thought" ... Here's a quote from: Mr. Allan Cantle, president of Nallatech, an FPGA development company :

“In an ideal world, multiple processors would achieve linear performance increase with no additional overhead, and no performance would be lost due to inter-device communication. Unfortunately, the reality is somewhat different. This is because there is overhead introduced by the need for physical communication, and additional cycles are lost trying to coordinate the application partitioned among multiple processors. Although it’s the job of the programmers to work that out when implementing the application, the reality is that no matter how good a job they do, the result will most likely be less than optimal. Due to the physical communications overhead and difficulty of getting multiple devices to work well together, we don’t see a linear performance increase."

Mate ... The bad news is that the more "traditional" processors you add, the worse the problem gets.

All the best,

Uncle Joe

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