Actually multi core technology was taken from the Supercomputers.
I worked for Cray Computers a long time ago for a short stint and they were manufacturing parallel processing super computers that used multi processors arranged in parallel using super cooling technology to achieve super fast and super huge computing platforms.
What modern PC manufacturers have done is use this technology on a smaller and slower (Well we are pretty fast compared to 15 years ago) scale.
Cray is not the same company it used to be and most of the manufacturing was sold to SGI (I think) but that was what they were doing when I worked there.
Stewart At 06:29 PM 4/30/2007, you wrote:
Wikipedia has a good article on multi-core computing. It rightly points out that there are bottnecks that limit the speed gain of extra cores. For example, if there is a lot of memory access, a dual core will only be 30% faster than a single core. Adding even more cores in this situation will provide little gain. To benefit from multiple cores software has to be written with multiple threads. This is not how software was written in the past so it has to be rewritten for this. And the threads need to be given significant tasks so that the extra cores are kept busy. There is also the risk that this work will be wasted if the manufacturers go back to faster single cores or other methods of boosting speed. I consider multi-core to be primairly a marketing gimmick developed when further attempts to boost clock speed hit a wall.
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