On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 1:42 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+hhack...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Which include smartphones and tablets. Seems a bit overkill for those, > given that the software hasn't yet caught up to really taking advantage > of 4-core CPUs. I tend to agree. Most general purpose apps are not well optimized for lots of parallelism. In many cases, they are inherently serial. I just don't see developers spending a lot of time updating their $1.99 app to use 16 cores for what is likely to be a very niche hardware platform. > At "only" 1 GHz per CPU I don't think "supercomputer" is a compelling > option. > > The strength seems to be in applications that need lots of parallel > signal processing, like VoIP, video surveillance motion detection > software video compression, etc. If you are doing any kind of simulation over a 3D space (weather, protein folding, etc.), I can see trading core speed for # of cores. You just change the granularity at which you assign individual cores to be responsible for physical regions/objects/etc. I think a lot of supercomputing still fits into this category. If I were them I would start dealing with the various manufacturers who sell specialized add-on boards to soup up PC servers for scientific computing. It sounds like you could easily put 4 chips (64 cores) onto a single board PCI express board. Linux Journal used to have ads from those companies all the time. Bill Bogstad _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list Hardwarehacking@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
