subject: Missing The Boat On Multithreading? posted: Thu, 07 Feb 2008 02:17:31 -0000
[My question was, does Vista actually use the extra cores on a
multicore chip? And the answer is yes, but not much. Although
Windows has supported multiple processors since Windows NT, it
apparently hasn't actually used them much. Vista improves on this by
using them a bit. The bottom line remains that *applications* must
be *rewritten* to use the extra cores. As most applications have NOT
been rewritten to use the extra cores, there is currently little
advantage to having them (the exceptions being specific circumstances
where multithreaded software has been deployed, such as the
background indexing service in Vista). The little advantage that
does come from a multicore system is due to lower interrupt
overheads, or something equally esoteric, which might give a bit more
grunt but is minimal, say 10% extra grunt. Repeat, a dual-core
system running at 2.0Ghz DOES NOT run anywhere nearly as fast as a
single-core 4.0GHz system. It might run like a 2.2Ghz system.
Repeat, the 4.0Ghz system will be nearly TWICE AS FAST as the dual-
core 2.0Ghz system. Vista detects multicore systems and switches on
a bunch of extra bells and whistles, which actually give the extra
cores some work. Aside from that unless you have *applications
software* which supports multicores, the only benefit you'll see is
slightly smoother multitasking, in certain circumstances only.
The same is true for other operating systems. Vista is special
because it's the first Windows to actually utilise the extra cores
(rather than simply providing support for applications to address
them). If you have the latest SMP-capable unix, but you only run
single-threaded apps, you're wasting your extra cores, just as you
would be on Windows. Windows XP allows applications to use the extra
cores, but itself does not use them; without multithreaded apps,
there is no benefit at all to using a multicore machine with Windows
XP.
Given that software takes a lot of time and effort to write, and that
it all needs to be rewritten, in a new way, to support multicore
chips, I don't see multicore chips being useful anytime in the near
future. In fact I expect that most of the extra cores in the current
crop of multicore chips will be thrown away at the end of their
useful lives, never having executed a single instruction. The
article below concludes that the hardware is ahead of the software,
this is still the case. - Stu]
Missing The Boat On Multithreading?
It's been 18 months since Intel introduced the first dual-core
desktop processor, but only a handful of ISVs have written
applications that exploit the multicore architecture. And that's a
missed opportunity for PC vendors, commercial ISVs, custom
application developers and solution providers serving the mainstream
business market.
By Paula Rooney, CRN
Dec 11, 2006
URL:http://www.ddj.com/security/196602940
It's been 18 months since Intel introduced the first dual-core
desktop processor, but only a handful of ISVs have written
applications that exploit multicore architectures. And Intel's quad-
core desktop processor will ship next month.
That's a missed opportunity for commercial ISVs, custom application
developers and solution providers serving the mainstream business
market.
"While dual-core technology provides compelling performance metrics,
very few of our ISV partners have optimized their code for this
groundbreaking technology," said Patrick Taylor, president of Dallas-
based Proactive Technologies, an integrator who has served on Intel's
channel board of advisors. "The business world is only
conversationally aware of multithreading and has yet to take
advantage of hyper-threading, which is four years old," he said.
"I'm not sure why they have failed to prepare for these
developments," Taylor added. "One would think an ISV would leap at
the chance to be first ready with a hyperthreaded application that
ran well in a multicore environment."
Signs suggest a transition is quietly taking shape. With dual-core
processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices now the standard in
mainstream PCs, and second-generation quad-core processors set to
begin shipping in early 2007, some ISVs are gearing up for the next
era in desktop computing.
Most notably, Microsoft recently launched its first multithreaded
desktop software: Windows Vista and Office Excel 2007.
Multicore technology is more than an extension of Moore's Law, the
historical doubling of processor speed every two years. It's a new
era in software development and business computing, said Herb Sutter,
software architect at Microsoft, Redmond, Wash.
"If you look back over the past 25 years, Microsoft has succeeded in
its mission to put a PC on every desktop, in the living room, on
mobile devices, in making PC computing available everywhere," he
said. "But the mission we've just embarked upon is putting a Cray
supercomputer on everyone's desktop, enabled by multicore processors.
That's the way supercomputers are architected."
Multithreaded databases and other server applications have been
available for decades on SMP-based servers and, more recently, on
dual-core Xeon and Opteron processors from Intel and AMD,
respectively. And ISVs, including Adobe Systems and Symantec, have
long offered multithreading in their 3-D modeling applications and
security software that operate in the background. The applications
optimized for multicore desktop processors are aimed primarily at
digital content creators and designers who work with a massive amount
of data, 3-D images and realtime graphics rendering.
As the number of cores increases, it enables new features like
desktop editing of high-definition video, said Adobe's Giles Baker,
product manager.
Boxx Technologies, Austin, Texas, for instance, is one niche system
builder making a living designing and selling workstations with two
dual-core or two quad-core processors.
NEXT: Microsoft moves on multicore.
But the power of multi-core processing is moving beyond the technical
workstation to the business desktop. Most notably, Microsoft is
beginning its transition to multithreading.
Observers hope that increased support of multithreading by mainstream
business ISVs will usher in a new era of software design and new
classes of applications not available on the PC in the past. This
would drive a major PC upgrade cycle and widen opportunities for
system builders and mainstream solution providers.
Some blame ISVs for failing to keep pace with advances in hardware,
and many say this has stalled sales of new PCs, peripherals and
services. Microsoft's five-year-long development cycle for Windows
Vista is oft-cited as one key reason for stagnancy in the overall PC
ecosystem.
Now Microsoft is ready to move forward. At the recent launch of Vista
and Office 2007 in New York, company executives highlighted the
significant performance benefits of running Vista on Intel Core 2 Duo
processors.
When asked about the multiplying glut of raw processing power on the
market, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer agreed software vendors have been
unable to keep pace with Intel and AMD, and slow to adapt to
multicore technology. But he hinted that gap is narrowing.
"Intel and AMD are giving us more power in a very different form than
ever before. We kind of liked the old form of Moore's Law really
well, which meant processor speed just doubled every year and a half.
That was a really nice thing for software guys," Ballmer said at the
Nov. 30 launch. "Now they're going to give us more cores, not just
more processor speed, and that puts more burden on not just us but
everybody who writes software to write it in a different manner
that's able to take advantage of the power. So each of us is
innovating, the chip industry and the software industry."
To highlight the benefits of the two complementary technologies,
Microsoft and Intel hit the road together this fall to demonstrate to
partners the unique benefits of running Vista and Office 2007 on
Intel Core 2 Duo systems.
New compute-intensive features in Vista, such as its 3-D rendering,
invisible search indexing, media playback and video downloading as
well as other applications running in the background, such as SideBar
gadgets and security sweeps, are enabled by and require multicores to
run well, Sutter said.
ISVs must write applications that can scale to many cores, he said.
Excel 2007's multithreaded recalculation technology enables advanced
financial modeling in complicated spreadsheets because it splits up
calculations among various cores, Sutter added. And it scales beyond
quad cores to eight cores in linear fashion.
Partners hope Microsoft's new multithreaded applications and
widescale availability of multicore PCs will inspire other ISVs to
develop new applications.
"I imagine it will be this way until more and more applications are
written to take full advantage of multi-threaded environments. We're
talking about quad cores, but dual cores are just starting to really
gain traction and acceptance in the mainstream market. I think 2007
is going to be a big year for computer resellers," said Todd Swank,
director of marketing at Nortech in Burnsville, Minn.
"Absolutely, applications should be multithreaded. Most applications,
including those from Microsoft, are not yet multithreaded," said
Brian Bergin, president of Terabyte Computers, Boone, N.C. "Until
now, the only way to get SMP was with expensive motherboards and dual
CPUs. Now that dual-core CPUs are common, truly multithreaded SMP-
aware applications can be written to take advantage of them."
NEXT: Forecast for multithreaded applications. Security ISVs such as
Symantec use multithreading to enable virus checks in the background.
Parallels, Renton, Wash., will include virtual SMP support in its
next virtualization application that takes full advantage of
multicore machines by assigning specific cores to virtual machines,
and applying other VMs to your "real" machine, said Benjamin Rudolph,
marketing manager at Parallels.
"Right now, VMs work as single-thread machines," he said. "This is
actually a very good thing for the average user, as it ensures a
great balance of performance between your host machine and guest VMs.
We've found that for most tasks, having one core for a VM and one
core for the real machine is a good spread of resources. Virtual SMP
will be included so power users can tweak performance as much or as
little as they need."
Adobe's PDF Print Engine, announced in April, has a scalable,
multithreaded architecture that scales in PCs with multicore
processors and multiple processors, the company said. Such
performance gains drive the addition of new capabilities such as
workflow.
Developers will step up as businesses begin to appreciate the
benefits of multicore computing.
"For business application developers, writing multi-threaded code is
unusual. Exceptions to that might include heavy-duty real-time
systems for things like stock and foreign exchange trades, where
microseconds count," said Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at
Twenty-Six, a Microsoft partner in New York. He said multicore
desktops are better able to run multiple applications in parallel and
allow more complex tasks to execute separately, while more mundane
aspects of the application remain nicely responsive.
Microsoft's Sutter said it's "very" possible to write multithreaded
applications, but software writers must find a way to assign
different tasks to each core.
He said tools vendors will extend languages and frameworks to make
concurrent programming easier. Future versions of Visual Studio will
include wizards and make it easier to debug and profile multithreaded
applications for performance.
Rob Hoffman, senior marketing manager at Autodesk, San Rafael,
Calif., said single-core processors may be sufficient for running the
applications out there today, but availability of multicore PCs will
drive new application development. "Multicore is here to stay," he
said.
His observation was echoed by Ed Carasappa, director of business
development at Boxx Technologies, which shipped four of its first
workstations to ISVs that develop multithreaded applications.
"We've seen new releases that are 64-bit and multithreaded. But there
are barely any desktop applications that can take advantage of even a
quad core," Carasappa said. "When will it become pervasive? It
depends on what the business community does, but it's already
happening for Microsoft."
One analyst said that availability of quad-core processors, PCs and
applications next year should drive a major upgrade cycle.
"For now, quad-core processors are really only suited to a niche
segment of the market. Quad cores are like exotic cars-they won't
sell a lot, but unlike the car market, these exotics will rapidly
become mainstream, probably within 18 months," said Steve Kleynhans,
vice president of the Client Platforms Group at Gartner. "Having them
in the market now encourages the rest of the ecosystem-and
specifically, the software makers-to begin to design with quad core
in mind."
"We are slowly starting to see more and more general applications
becoming multicore aware, but generally multicore processors just
allow a consumer to multitask better and run more applications
without seeing a dramatic slowdown," said James Huang, a marketing
specialist at AMAX, San Jose, Calif. "Multicore is definitely the
future, but for now the hardware is ahead of the software."
