> On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 9:56 AM, David Young <dyo...@pobox.com> wrote:
The algorithms don't have to run as fast as possible, they only have to
run fast enough that the system is responsive to the user. If there is
a motion graphic, you need to run the algorithm fast enough that the
motion isn't choppy.
That's not correct. For image processing and compression, you want to use
as many cores as you can so the operation completes more quickly. For the
rest, using more cores means that the algorithm can do a better job, giving
a more accurate physics simulation, detecting motion more quickly and
accurately, and so on.
I think the problem that I have with this API is "the number of cores
that exist" isn't obviously a good proxy for "the number of cores that
are available". It I have N cores and am already using M cores for e.g.
decompressing video, N-M is probably a much better estimate of the
available resources than N. I suppose for some applications e.g. games,
scientific simulations, people are likely to set up their system with
M=0 before they start. However that isn't obviously the common case.
