The Economics of Chips With Many Cores 343
meanonymous writes "HPCWire reports that a unique marketing model for 'manycore' processors is being proposed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers. The current economic model has customers purchasing systems containing processors that meet the average or worst-case computation needs of their applications. The researchers contend that the increasing number of cores complicates the matching of performance needs and applications and makes the cost of buying idle computing power increasingly prohibitive. They speculate that the customer will typically require fewer cores than are physically on the chip, but may want to use more of them in certain instances. They suggest that chips be developed in a manner that allows users to pay only for the computing power they need rather than the peak computing power that is physically present. By incorporating small pieces of logic into the processor, the vendor can enable and disable individual cores, and they offer five models that allow dynamic adjustment of the chip's available processing power."
How is this new? (Score:4, Informative)
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I dont know whether this is possible with zLinux partitions, as alot of the moving about of stuff is very much a z/OS function, I.e. done by the OS, not the hardware or virtualisation.
Requires a near-monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
In a competitive market where 100-core processors cost $100 to produce, a company selling 50-core crippled ones for $101 and 100-core processors for $200 would quickly be pushed out of business by a company making the 100-core processors for $100 and selling them, uncrippled, for $101. I expect the Intel-AMD duopoly leaves Intel some scope to cripple its processors to maintain price differentials (arguably they already do that by selling chips clocked at a lower rate than they are capable of). But they couldn't indulge in this game too much because customers would buy AMD instead (unless AMD agreed to also cripple its multicore chips in the same way, which would probably be illegal collusion).
Compare software where you have arbitrary limits on the number of seats, incoming connections, or even the maximum file size that can be handled. It costs the vendor nothing more to compile the program with MAX_SEATS = 100 instead of 10, but they charge more for the 'enterprise' version because they can. But only for programs that don't have effective competition willing to give the customer what he wants. Certainly any attempt to apply this kind of crippling to Linux has failed in the market because you can easily change to a different vendor (see Caldera).
S/W licensed per processor (Score:3, Insightful)
And when your software is licensed per processor at (let's say) $100 per cpu, your extra, unwanted, 50 processors quickly become a burden. I'd be willing to pay more for a crippled processor if it saved me money elsewhere, a
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IBM for example when licensing some stuff (namely Lotus Domino): they go by performance units.
A single core x86 CPU would be 100 units per core. Dual-core CPU's would be 50 units per core (notice that they work out to the same). Quad-cores however are also 50 units per core, so while a Single and Dual Core chip cost the same, Quad Cores end up costing twice as much in license fees.
They even have some architectures where it changes to different va
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If there is performance parity along the entire product line of two processor competitors, like there had been until the Core2 era, that doesn't stop crippling. You don't need collusion - both companies could have parallel reasons to offer tiered prices for differently-crippled variants.
But here's what I think is interesting: If
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While in theory technology might out pace demand, and I think it may very well happen someday, in practice this is something that I'll believe when I see it.
Right now there are a lot of flashy games out there. Users may want to run many more applications at once (or more likely turn on M$ poorly executed eyecandy and not notice their computers slowing down).
I don't think this is something
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I believe that you're thinking about the quote commonly attributed to Bill Gates '640k will be enough for anyone'.
Right now there are a lot of flashy games out there. Users may want to run many more applications at once (or more likely turn on M$ poorly executed eyecandy and not notice their computers slowing down).
Until 3D acceleration is so good that you can't tell it from real life, all
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..I expect the Intel-AMD duopoly leaves Intel some scope to cripple its processors to maintain price differentials...
Interestingly, of late, it is AMD that is trying to create product differentiating by crippling their processors, or at least by selling processors with one core switched off. They're trying to do this by selling "tri-core" processors based on their Barcelona/Phenom cores, which are nothing much an actual quad-core with a core turned off, either deliberately, or because it is defective. They probably want to position this as a mid-range offering, to make it more competitive to Intel's relatively cheaper q
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It'd probably be more profitable to up the price of the tri-core a nitch*. A couple bucks would reduce the demand for the tri-core, as some people decide to settle for a dual core instead and some decide that the now smaller difference between a tri-core and a quad core makes it worth it to buy a quad core.
IE:
Quad: $100, Tri $75, Dual $50 - not enough triples to meet demand
Quad $100, Tri $77,
Re:Requires a near-monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the same misconseption people often apply to baseball player salaries - they do NOT drive ticket prices. Baseball ticket prices are set at the highest level the market will bear - a price that is determined as consumers make decisions between countless sources of entertainment and leisure.
What is confusing is that the quality of a product (and therefore the market demand for it, sometimes) is often related to the cost of production, so it looks like production costs set prices. But remember when Homer designed a car? It was $80,000, and no one wanted to buy it at that price! The consumers decided there were better uses for their car-buying dollars. This is a perfect (although fictional) illustration of why costs != prices in a competitive market.
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This is also why Sony used a Cell with only seven SPUs instead of the eight designed on the chip: if a single SPU fails (which is much more like
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Re:How is this [business model] new? (Score:5, Informative)
Because it's dumb.
In 1999 I paid about AU$600 for a midrange Pentium Pro CPU. In 2008, I bought a midrange Xeon Dual-core for the massively increased price of... AU$600.
In 2000, I bought a shiny new Intergraph TDZ2000 with two PII 350s for the bargain cost of just $5,000. Now, Apple is prepared to sell me a Mac Pro with two 2.8GHz, quad core Xeons for the stupefying price of $2,799.00.
Now, explain to me again why it would be in my best economic interest to buy a computer with cores that could be disabled if I don't pay my rent?
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Re:How is this [business model] new? (Score:4, Informative)
And the best one: Two Athlon XP 2400+ cpus that I unlocked with a conductive pen to be Athlon MP 2400+s, and I still use in a dual-cpu board now.
Generally, unlocked or overclocked pc parts burn out faster than if they'd been left alone (e.g. the 6800LE I mentioned died a horrible death, and now doesn't work at all). However if the chip was DESIGNED to be able to be unlocked, it would be perfectly safe.
Re:How is this [business model] new? (Score:5, Insightful)
Design is one. Manufacturing is two. Chip manufacturing is not perfect. It is more likely that the disabled parts failed full test, but that parts were still working (and thus make it sellable as a downgraded chip). All you did was enable the defective parts. And then it blew. No surprise there.
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Assuming using JUST your logic, every slower processor or chip is one that has failed to be higher processor or chip across the same line of products. We all know that is not the case. There are also market demands that must be met. I have no idea about failure rates but I highly doubt only failed chips make lower tier products. What percentage of what does each company or product line use? No one here has any idea.
The availablity dictates price, price regulates demand.
Take 'LE' and 'GT' releases of NVidia
Re:How is this [business model] new? (Score:5, Informative)
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Most people would buy the cheap stuff and unlock later - whereas today, they buy the more expensive mid-range stuff. This is revenue lost.
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Works well for your average user and we all know that everyone else will just find flaws to turn on the unpaid cores.
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IGA would like to access the internet Allow or Cancel ?
Great just what I need even more things for Windows Vista to bother me about.
Hardware DRM.... (Score:5, Funny)
CC.
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I may only use four of my eight cores most of the time, but there are eight of them there, nonetheless.
Re:Hardware DRM.... (Score:4, Informative)
What is dumb is this pay me to turn on more cores idea.
It really goes counter to the idea of of OWNING or BUYING a pc. If I BUY the computer I OWN the computer. I shouldn't have to pay you to unlock some part of the that computer.
Yes it is going back to the days of the Mainframe and frankly I don't think that is a good idea.
Not running on all cylinders (Score:3, Insightful)
The benefit to the vehicle owner is lower fuel costs, not an economic model to transmit his cylinder utilization to the manufacturer for a reduction in his vehicle loan payments. That'd just be silly.
If you want a car with less power, you opt for a smaller engine. If you want a single-core
Re:Hardware DRM.... (Score:5, Funny)
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It'll still accelerate like shit off a chrome shovel, and if you really want the 200 mph or so that 500 bhp will give you, it's possible to remap the ECU to remove the limit.
The best use for disabling cylinders is when driving in traffic - to be able to run on half the normal number of cylinders at idle saves a hell of a lot of fuel, especially in a 500 hp behemoth.
Disclaimer - I drive a slightly tweaked Scorpio Cossie that k
Re:Hardware DRM.... (Score:5, Funny)
Darth Diggler (Score:2)
It's a valid point. Certainly the European car manufacturers have a "gentleman's agreement" to limit their high-end sports cars to a maximum speed of 155mph (around 250km/h). Now, I know that I wouldn't use that kind of power every day, but it would annoy me to know that the car was capable of more but prevented from doing so by an artificial limitation. If I'm paying for a 500bhp car, I want it to run like a 500bhp car...
I suppose people like you are the reason for the limitation.
Isn't this one of the attitudes about women put forward by the porn industry? If she comes equipped with three cylinders, I want all three, even if I've only got one piston.
Steven Pinker has a pretty good article in the NYTimes about moral instincts. By one method of hamming the hog, there are five core instincts: Harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html [nytimes.com]
Unfortunately, he leaves out gratification entitlement, which is
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I suspect that you are not aware that they've been doing this for some time now. [findarticles.com]
Chris Mattern
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Microsoft running cars electronics, already happening... (I shudder at the thought)...
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/55980 [autosport.com]
or for more PR
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/dec06/12-11FIAPR.mspx [microsoft.com]
"[ ... ] Microsoft's innovative technologies to deliver the best electronic system possible." And I was wondering why those formula one engines kept blewing up during races. I hope this doesn't make it to the general public (although my bicycle should be safe for now)
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New form of overclocking - "over coring" (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the real case for virtualization... (Score:2)
Beyond that, I don't really get it... if I have a certain computational workload X, I'd probably prefer to use more cores temporarily rather than pace the work longer ove
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It doesn't make sense for desktop computers with one user at a time.
same old as software rental... (Score:5, Insightful)
Renting your own possessions back to you is the sweetest dream of all hardware, software and "entertainment" manufacturers. Never let them do it.
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Well in that case you can remove the tinfoil. This is aimed at people who do, they have the money to get it and the bussiness sense to know what to do with it. I don't mean to be rude but nobody cares if you have your own data center in the basement, unless of course you want to pay someone serious money to look after it for you.
"Renting your own possessions back" is a practise used by multi-nationals for tax purposes.
The rent model is flawed because ... (Score:4, Informative)
Dedicated circuitry to create artificial scarcity and control actually adds unnecessary costs.
This might be useful in very specific scenarios where somebody, say, owns a supercomputer and rents it out, but even there, I'm sure there are far better solutions that don't involve the CPU hardware.
This is, like you suggest, just a BS wet dream of the manufacturers
Right now we probably have few enough major chip vendors that with a little bit of collusion, if they decided not to compete, they could probably pull something like this on us. This doesn't look likely right now, but it seems possible. Hopefully some other (possibly foreign) company would enter the market if that happened. Competition is healthy for a market.
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For the individual, personal computer, such a model will not fly, as outlined.
However, in the enterprise market this is already there. IBM is using such a 'on-demand' model for its Series P hardware since a couple of years. For a small fee, IBM is installing a bigger configuration (CPU, memory) than the customer bought. The additional hardware is used automatically in case of a failure (built-in replacement parts) or can be unlocked by the customer on the fly.
In the enterprise case it makes sense:
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Re:same old as software rental... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft != Life.
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It seems unlikely that this is true, given that you did not agree to the EULA at time of purchase. In reality, you purchase a copy (thus you own it) but there is a technological restriction that prevents you from actually making use of it until you agree to some restrictions (the EULA).
Which raises the question - enforcing t
erm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe it'll be a subscription service, 9.99 per month and
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So, Intel is going to charge us less for a processor with 4 cores because we can turn three off most of the time? Or is the power saving supposed to make the cost of the chip less prohibitive?
First, it seems you are under the impression that this might be Intel's idea. It is not. Second, turning off cores is stupid. If you want to reduce performance of a multi-core chip, you reduce the clock speed as far as possible. Four cores at a quarter of the maximum clock speed use lots less electricity than one core running at full speed.
You know what I don't get? (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me compare it to, say, a construction company having a number of teams and a number of resources, e.g., vehicles:
1. One team, 4 vehicles. That's classic single core. Downside, at a given moment it might only need 2 or 3 of those vehicles. (E.g., once you're done digging the foundation, you have a lot less need of the bulldozer.)
2. Two teams, can pick what they need from a common pool of 4 vehicles. That's classic "hyperthreading". Downside, you're not getting twice the work done. Upside, you still paid only for 4 vehicles, and you're likely to get more out of them.
3. Two teams, each with 4 vehicles of its own. They can't borrow one from each other. This is "dual core." Downside, now any waste from point 1 is doubled.
But the one I don't see is, say,
4. Two teams with a common pool of 8 vehicles. It's got to be more efficient than number 3.
Basically #4 is the logical extension of hyperthreading, and it seems to me more efficient any way you want to slice it. Even if you add HT to dual-core design, you end up with twice #2 instead of #4 with 4 teams and a common pool. There is no reason why splitting the pool of resources (be it construction vehicles or execution pipelines) should be more efficient than having them all in a larger dynamically-allocated pool.
So why _are_ we doing that stupidity? Just because AMD at one point couldn't get hyperthreading right and had its marketers convince everyone that worse is better, and up is down?
Re:You know what I don't get? (Score:4, Insightful)
AFAIK adding more MHz was getting more and more complicated, so it was time to try a new trick.
You misunderstood my question (Score:2)
What I'm saying is: ok, so now they have to expand in width, so to speak, instead of in MHz. Fine. But why is (A) two separated sets of, say, 3 pipelines better (B) than a set of 6 with two execution units, allocated dynamically? It's still 8 pipelines, only the second one can be dynamically allocated with better results. If one particular thread could use 4 while another used only 2, solutio
Re:You know what I don't get? (Score:5, Informative)
Instruction scheduling is the biggest fundamental problem facing CPUs today. Even the best pipelined design issues only one instruction per clock, per pipeline (excluding things like macro-op fusion which combine multiple logical instructions into a single internal instruction). So we add more pipelines. But more pipelines can only get us so far - it becomes increasingly more difficult to figure out (schedule) which instructions can be executed on which pipeline at what time.
There are several potential solutions. One is to use a VLIW architecture where the compiler schedules instructions and packs them into bundles which can be executed in parallel. The problem with VLIW is that many scheduling decisions can only occur at runtime. VLIW is also highly dependent on having excellent compilers. All of these problems (among others) plagued Intel's advanced VLIW (they called it "EPIC") architecture, Itanium.
Another solution is virtual cores, or HyperThreading. HTT uses instructions from another thread (assuming that one is available) to fill pipeline slots that would otherwise be unused. The problem with HTT is that you still need a substantial amount of decoding logic for the other thread, not to mention a more advanced register system (although modern CPUs already have a very advanced register system, particularly on register-starved architectures like x86) and other associated logic. In addition, if you want to get benefits from pipeline stalls (e.g like on the P4), you need even more logic. This means that HTT isn't particularly beneficial unless you have code that results in a large number of data dependencies or branch mispredicts, or if pipeline stalls are particularly expensive.
Multicore CPUs have come about for one simple reason: we can't figure out what to do with all of the transistors we have. CPUs have become increasingly complex, yet the fabrication technology keeps marching forward, outpacing the design resources that are available. This has manifested itself in two main ways.
First, designers started adding larger and larger caches to CPUs (caches are easy to design but take up lots of transistors). But after a point, adding more cache doesn't help. The more cache you have, the slower it operates. So designers added a multi-level cache hierarchy. But this too only goes so far - as you add more cache levels, the performance delta between memory and cache decreases, because there's only a finite level of reference locality in code (data structures like linked lists don't help this). You may be able to get a single function in cache, but it's unlikely that you're going to get the whole data set used by a complex program. The net result is that beyond a certain point, adding more cache doesn't do much.
What do you do when you can't add more cache? You could add more functional units, but then you're constrained by your front-end logic again, which is a far more difficult problem to solve. You could add more front-end logic, which is what HyperThreading does. But that only helps if your functional units are sitting idle a substantial percentage of the time (as they did on the P4).
So you look at adding both functional units and more front-end logic. You'll decode many instruction streams and try to schedule them on many pipelines. This is what modern GPUs do, and for them, it works quite well. But most general-purpose code is loaded with data dependencies and branches, which makes it very difficult to schedule more than a very few (say, 4) instructions at a time, regardless of how many pipelines you have. So, now, effectively, you have one thread that is predominantly using 4 pipelines, and one that is predominantly using the other 4.
Wait, though. If one thread is mostly using one set of pipelines, and one is mostly using the other, we can split the pipelines into two groups. Each will take one thread. This way, our register and cache systems are simpler (because
Well, thanks for the answer (Score:2)
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Comparing it with the construction analogy. if you w
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Quick history lesson. Intel tried pawning off hyperthreading to the market. If you mean that AMD should have done hyperthreading, perhaps you should look at the reviews/benchmarks to see that it reduced performance in many cases. In the future, more software might by able to take advantage of increased thread parallelism, but that future is not now, at least in the x86 world.
Yes, yes it is. (Score:2)
Parallel processing is not some weird dream, way off in the future, that lots of people here on slashdot think it is. It's a reality and it's here now.
In fact it's been with us since the 70s in the form of multi-process software.
Multithreading has some idiots running scared ("It's so *hard*!" being their favourite lie), but it's been with us for quite some time. I've been writing multi threaded server and workstation software for about 8 years no
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Yes and no (Score:3, Insightful)
While I'll concede the point that Intel's first implementation was flawed, you can't judge and damn a technology for all eternity just
Would we know the difference? (Score:5, Informative)
In either case, I'm fairly sure I see at least two items in
As for your assertion, a quick scan of Wikipedia suggests that you're a bit naively wrong here. (But then, I'm the one pretending to know what I'm talking about from a quick scan of wikipedia; I suppose I'm being naive.) Wikipedia makes a distinction between Instruction level parallelism [wikipedia.org] and Thread level parallelism [wikipedia.org], with advantages and disadvantages for each.
One of the advantages of thread-level parallelism is that it's software deciding what can be parallized and how. This is all the threading, locking, message-passing, and general insanity that you have to deal with when writing code to take advantage of more than one CPU. As I understand it, a pipelining processor essentially has to do this work for you, by watching instructions as they come in, and somehow making sure that if instruction A depends on instruction B, they are not executed together. One way of doing this is to delay the entire chain until instruction A finishes. Another is to reorder the instructions.
But even if you consider this a solved problem, it requires a bit of hardware to solve. I'm guessing at some point, it's easier to just throw more cores at the problem than to try to make each core a more efficient pipeline, just as it's easier to throw more cores at the problem than it is to try to make each core run faster.
There's also that user-level interface I talked about above. With multicore and no hyperthreading, the OS knows which core is which, and can distribute tasks appropriately -- idle tasks can take up half of one core, the gzip process (or whatever) can take up ALL of another core. With multicore and hyperthreading, the OS might not know -- it might simply see four cores. And with multicore, hyperthreading, and shared pipelines, it gets worse -- as I understand it, there's no longer any way, at that point, that an OS can specify which CPU a particular thread should be sent to. Threading itself may become irrelevant.
Well, anyway... What confuses me is that we still haven't adopted languages and practices that naturally scale to multiple cores. I'm not talking about complex threading models that make it easy to deadlock -- I'm talking about message-passing systems like Erlang, or wholly-functional systems like Haskell.
Hint: Erlang programs can easily be ported from single-core to multi-core to a multi-machine cluster. Haskell programs require extra work at the source code level to be made single-threaded, and can (like Make) use an arbitrary number of threads, specifiable at the commandline. They're not perfect, by far; Haskell's garbage collector is single-threaded, I think. But that's an implementation detail; most programs in C and friends, even Perl/Python/Ruby, will not be written with multiple cores in mind, and, in fact, have single-threaded implementations (or stupid things like the GIL).
Well, yes, but... (Score:2)
As for the languages, good question. I guess because it's cheaper to use existing skills and libraries than to port everything to Erlang? No real idea, though. I'm sure someone is better qualified than me to answer that.
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Re:You know what I don't get? (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess that's why IBM did not develop the cell processor which is therefor not used in PS3s or why no supercomputer is built using it.
All this also explains why IBM did not develop a new product line of cell based blade servers. And neither are grids being built around cell based servers.
Of course even if IBM did develop it and sony did use it in the PS3, it would be unable to run anything which is why there isn't any game for the PS3 or why there are not linux distribution for the PS3.
Sorry, but a different architecture doesn't mean nothing runs on it, nor does it mean noone will develop for it if the promised power is cheap and proficient enough.
Heh. Why are YOU on Slashdot? (Score:2)
No, everything _you_ answered was irrelevant, because you don't even seem to understand the question. You just repeat the marketing line without even understanding what was asked.
Yes, we need to do more things in parallel. That much is clear, Captain Obvious. The question is how we do that the most efficiently, with the same amount of silicon.
The question was, yes, if other CPU architectures and designs could still do those background tasks, but make better use of the
What's wrong with this picture? (Score:2)
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Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't he profit more if he could sell the 5 core processors all at $600 and make a separate 2 core processor for the price of $200 and sell it for $400?
Well if they're going to rent it (as some of TFA said), it would make sense but if they're not, then it would be a profit not maximized.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The cost of designing one core is the same as the cost of designing 10 or 100 cores, because copy and paste was invented several years ago. The cost of adding a core to the design is about 1%.
There might be a case for powering down unused processors to save energy, and there is a case for selling cheaper processors with reduced core counts where some cores don't work, but there is no case for disabling working processeors for economic reasons.
Sun's Niagra technology differs, cos it has "virtual cores" which gives you more virtual cores but slower. Its very good if you multi-thread (run apache) and p*ss- poor if you dont (run Windows).
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Copy-pasting a hundred cores will cost almost ten times as much as copy-pasting 10 cores because you have to pay the patent holder who invented copy-paste.
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Thanks, that cleared it up completely for me.
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Economy of scale says not necessarily. If you can build a factory that only builds one product, you can make it incredibly efficient. One possibility under this plan would be to intelligently disable cores. For example, let's say there is some failure rate in each core. The chips with high failure rates can have the failed cores disabled, and the compan
This is a truly stupid idea (Score:3, Interesting)
In theory it makes sense and some of you might point at mainframes as an example. However that would like comparing cars to trucks (real trucks not big cars), they are both vehicles and a company might use both but their usage is totally different.
PC's just ain't upgraded, either they are good enough or they are replaced. I love building my own computer but am not as crazy as to replace the CPU whenever a new clockspeed comes out and this means that even a self-builder will often have to bite the bullet and just replace everything.
Be honest, how often in business do you upgrade your desktops by replacing the CPU?
We can test this easily, in the era of the P3 a lot of office systems were DUAL ready, so that when your needs increased you could ad another P3 and have lots more power. How many of you did that with a P3 that had been in the office for more then a year?
This scheme seems like overthinking the problem. PC's in my experience either last until they die and by that time it cheaper to buy new then upgrade/repair, or they are simply replaced with the latest shining model because tech moves so fast that upgrading just the CPU will turn everything else into a bottle neck. Just check how many different types of memory we have had over the years. Would you really want a quad core on your IDE-33 motherboard? Play DVD's on a single speed cd-rom?
Either you need all the cores now, or by the time you activate them because your apps need them everything else will need to be upgraded too and a brand new CPU will be available that is far better AND cheaper.
But in a way we have had this solution for a long time now, but instead of activating extra cores when paid for, chipmakers instead sell defective chips for a reduced price so your still got a 4 core inside your machine but only 2 actually function (not sure wether this happens with entire cores but it is offcourse the case with cache memory).
I don't see this happening, especially if you consider that an army of nerds would be trying their best to break the enabling code to get their extra cores for free, just see what happened with the "dual" P2 and cheapo P3's, Intel would have a heart attack.
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When you buy a computer, you buy it for the worst-case scenario. Your processing needs are probably not going to mysteriously increase ove
Do I understand this right? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Everybody gets the same chip, but it will be crippled unless you pay the highest price.
2. Everybody gets the same uncrippled chip, but there's a FLOPS meter on it that phones home, and you pay Intel according to the amount of numbercrunching your chip did for you.
Both of these models seem completely retarded to me, although the first is already sort of in use in the CPU/GPU market. Have modern processors overshot our needs by so much that our big worry now is to find innovative ways to cripple them? If so, maybe this processor war we're fighting is ultimately not even worth winning.
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Probably more a sign of a new kind of software gap, IMHO due to still missing AI (not everyone is dealing with video/visual data), this again caused by an imbalance in investment in basic research which favours 'hard science' (with the assumption that there is much more to AI than 'logic', even if it is 'fuzzy').
If there were 'intelligent' applications that could fix Joe Sixpack's everyday problems more autonomously
Broken economics... (Score:2)
Back in the "olden" days of two years ago the same would happen but with clock speed. The chips that could clock higher without problems got sold as the 1800+ while ones that failed under testing at higher frequencies would get sold as 1600+.
Chips use so
Calculators (Score:4, Interesting)
Come on, this "reseracher" proposes DRM for CPUs (Score:2)
This can be accomplished with small pieces of logic incorporated into the processor that enables the vendor to disable/enable individual cores
Now think once or maybe twice about it. The situation could be that of a manager of a datacenter, which probably handles sensitive data, and lets the vendor mess realtime whith the CPUs (and possibly the data) driving the system just because he wants to save a few hundred dollars on a digitally castrated chip. Though idiotness is a widespread illness I don't see who could be such a moron. This could only be acceptable by the CIA or
Here's a better business model (Score:3, Interesting)
2) Make a platform where researchers can rent CPU power.
3) Allow your customers to rent their unused CPU power/cores.
4) Charge double what you give to your customers to the researchers.
5) Profit! (From both the sale and the rental afterwards).
And there is no ?...
Nobody bought the original DivX idea.. (Score:2)
Rediculousness. Besides which, it's a no-brainer that it'd be a zero-day hack to enable all the available processing power on a given chip.
they buy this because it saves money (Score:2, Informative)
The cost in IT labor and lost productivity during the downtime that old methods need to add processing capacity can be a *lot* for servers hosting your important applications but its awfully expensive to pay upfront for enough power to keep up with ordering spikes during the Christmas buying season (for example) if that spikes way beyond your normal needs. Much cheaper to pay for onl
Nice idea, then reality hits (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not about to pay a tax on other peoples poorly written software.
STOP TAGGING whatcouldbpossiblygowrong ALREADY (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
pity it is about the only bloody occurance where it is but throw enough darts and one is bound to hit the board...
Crippleware... (Score:5, Insightful)
Paying more for a product that costs the same to produce, or potentially even less because they don't have to disable the extra cores is a terrible rip off, and it happens already...
The same people who currently overclock, will buy the cheaper cpus with cores disabled and re-enable them... You will also get third parties who make a business out of doing the same, tho without the "exceeding design spec" risks of overclocking.
Personally, I will never pay more for a more expensive version of the same product, i will buy the cheapest available just as soon as people have worked out how to re-enable the disabled cores, and i will help my less technical friends do the same.
Graphics will use many cores (Score:2)
Also, if you need a job in the multicore business, check out http://www.intel.com/jobs/careers/visualcomputing/ [intel.com]
In short, visual computing (read gaming) will use all those cores mentioned in the article, word processing will not. Be so sure.
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Alternative (Score:2)
Dude... wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
And moreover, they apparently forgot which problem they're trying to solve between paragraphs 4 and 5. They start talking about the real problem of many cores creating a very large space of core/memory architectures that would be difficult to choose between and support. Then they veer off into the rent-your-own-hardware-back-to-you idea and never finish reasoning out just how it would work before they come back. A few minor things they ignored:
- How do they turn cores on? Difficult level: No, you can NOT have a privileged link through my firewall onto my network.
- How do they stop me from hacking it and enabling it all myself? Difficulty level: Mathematically impossible since you can't stop Eve from listening if Eve and Bob are the same person.
- How do they propose to bill me? Difficulty: No, I will NOT let my CPU spy on me.
- Why should I hand you everything you need to force me to upgrade against my will?
- What happens if you go out of business and leave me stranded?
- Even if you don't see what's wrong with charging me continually to access my own hardware, do you actually think I won't?
In conclusion, Profs. Sloan & Kumar of the University of Illinois, I believe the premises and reasoning behind your proposal to be flawed, and the proposal itself to be unworkable and contradictory to openness in computing. Or, as we say on the Internet, wtf r u doin???They already do this... (Score:3, Interesting)
CPU renting (Score:2)
Couple specific functions to a core (Score:2)
Another theory vs. application... (Score:2)
From teh core hackers to laws making it illegal to hack your cpu to then embedded spyware tosystem filure on serious systems due to accidently lock out to
And all this for what? A way for the CPU manufacture to control how much of something you own, can you use.
Wouldn't that be sweet? (Score:2)
Wouldn't that be sweet?
Dog in manger (Score:2)
greedy market strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing UNIQUE about this strategy. It's a model growing in popularity. Traditionally companies that wanted to capture several levels of market would make several models of a unit. Like buying a laptop with a better graphics chip or bus speed etc. This cost them more because they had to produce three different units which triples costs on some of their overheads. What this is doing is allowing them to produce one high end product, and configure it easily, post-production, to any of the three units they want to market. The same capabilities are present in all models, but features are disabled/crippled/nerfed in the less expensive models. This allows them to sell their product in the lower cost market without losing sales in their high end market, and without the additional expense of producing several different models.
It's a good idea for the manufacturer, but introduces the problem of what happens when the consumer figures out how to "enable" disabled features in their low end model? This always results in a little war of sorts, where the manufacturer takes steps to make de-nerfing difficult or impossible. It always aggravates the consumer to find out that after he conceded to buying the model that didn't do everything he wanted it to due to cost, CAN do it, it just refuses to. The consumer feels cheated that he payed for a gadget that CAN do what he wants it to, but can't take advantage of it.
Interestingly, it doesn't become a problem until the consumer realizes the product that they were obviously happy to pay the small amount for can do more than they bargained for. The producer would argue that you didn't pay what they were asking for those additional features and so you should not feel cheated, and that you agreed to the advertised feature set when you purchased the product.
The consumer then will try to modify the product to restore the disabled features, and can get upset if it's not possible or is made deliberately difficult.
As much as it causes aggravation in the consumer (that'd be ME) I think it's not a bad idea. What it all boils down to is you can't complain about a product being capable of performing beyond the advertised and accepted expectations at the time you purchased it. You agreed to buy it Just because it's done on purpose does not change the situation. If it CAN do more than advertised and claimed, and you can make it do that, good for you. If you can't, then too bad.
In the end, this DOES result in slightly higher cost for the low end model, because the cost of production (or development) of the low end product is higher than it would have been, if the company had only been making the low end model, and that money ends up in the pockets of the manufacturers who shave overhead on production. So from that point of view it's not a good thing for the consumer, but not for the reason they are seeing.