Henry, Dieter, the reason why the rush to multiple core is the (power or) heat dissipation in a single processor chip. When the transistor budget rises and the line sizes shrink also distances are increasing relatively and a lot of useless power (heat) is dissipated in the electrical connections. It was determined that the power density (Watt/um^2) of such a chip even compares to the power density of a nuclear power reactor! So the reason to go to multiple cores is to avoid blowing up the chip. Since november 2004 (Intel then acknowledged the end of high end single core processor models) manfacturers are putting local RAM close to (multiple) local processors. When cores are similar this is called multi-core (as quad core) and with heterogeneous systems this is called many-core. The latter ones are really champions in reducing power consumption. Jan.
On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 7:45 PM, DIETER ENSSLEN <[email protected]> wrote: > Hallo Henry > > Image processing comes to mind for the need for power; and video > processing, and there are always the gamers and hobbyists crying for more > power, but with the latter it is power for the sake of power. > Then there are the people who set records for the most digits for math > constants and such. > > But no matter what we think, chip and computer manufacturers will keep > upping the ante. Last decades supercomputer is today's PC. > > thanks > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Jan Jacobs Esdoornstraat 33 5995AN Kessel T: +31 77 462 1887 M: +31 6 23 82 55 21 E: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
