Re: Multi core

Anders Isaksson wrote:
Marco van de Voort wrote:

On 2008-04-28, Brad White wrote:
A quick glance at task manager shows that I have 65 processes
running on my workstation. It is hard to imagine how 4 cores
would not help with that.
So they are all eating CPU at once? Or do most of them happen to be
"0%" ? :-)

Most of the time most of them are quite passive, but when all of them
want to run at the same time, you can definitely benefit from many
cores. So, should we design our desktop computer for the average case
or for some more 'worse case'?

I have noticed a big boost in computer performance since switching to a
dual core PC. I believe I could use more than two cores, and still
notice it.


Funny, I recently helped family and neighbors with their Vista computers that had huge Gigahertz computers with several cores and all that nonsense... and their computers were no faster than my 600Mhz-800Mhz computers. Why? Because most people browse the internet, check email, and once in a while install drivers or install new programs.

While you are checking your email, you are rarely doing 6 other tasks as a typical user. Yet typical users still get sold on and sucked in to the hype of "SPEED SPEED SPEED" of processors.

What I find really useful today is having lots of memory so I can keep several projects open at once - a linux emulator, Mozilla, Thunderbird, MySQL Query Browser, Delphi, 5 console applications, a Text editor.

All these are IDLE PROGRAMS - memory. Not CPU.


I also find hibernation (shutting down PC and remembering state) extremely useful so I can return to what I was doing when I wake up in the morning - instead of reopening all mym windows again and again.

All of the benefits of computers for desktop users are based on MEMORY rather than CPU.

I still use an 800 mhz computer and have absolutely no reason to upgrade, unless I was a gamer, or unless my motherboard didn't support enough memory.

I have worked on faster computers (family and neighbors laptops) and found absolutely no need for them - UNLESS I am parsing 803262 files or compiling a C++ project with 3825 source files.

Even then - it is so rare that I do that - it is simply not needed for me to have a fast computer. And when I do parse 803262 files I can use a grid of computers and split the loop up into 803262 sections which a single multi processor motherboard won't scale to anyway - but a grid will.
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