Re: Treads in the new 6 core CPU from Intel

From:

"Jonathan Wood" <jwood@softcircuits.com>

Newsgroups:

microsoft.public.vc.mfc

Date:

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:29:07 -0700

Message-ID:

<#pVZEZWeIHA.484@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl>

I wish I knew more about this. I have a pretty new Dual Core with Vista and
it routinely hangs for about 30-60 seconds. I just assume it's due to some
sort of mutex in Vista.

So I don't know if it could be related at all to the chip but, frankly, I
don't see how things could get worse than they are already for me. :-(

--
Jonathan Wood
SoftCircuits Programming
http://www.softcircuits.com

"Roger Rabbit" <roger@rabbit.com> wrote in message
news:2E81601A-FD0B-45BB-BF24-F9C6B3EAC215@microsoft.com...

The new 6 core CPU from Intel is getting me thinking about my development
of software and working with hardware too. With 6 cores fighting for
resources, it seems that there is going to be some serious lag issues
working with shared pointers and threads in large scale programming
projects. The problem is with 6 threads all wanting access to the same
object in memory such as an index to a database are going to put a lot of
stress on memory. This is because memory has not kept up with CPU
advances.

Worse is going to be for data on a disk, threads are going to use I/O
locks heavily and this will degrade performance when a transaction
oriented program with a large number of queries are operating. Consider a
disk with 6ms access times, that 6 million times slower than a 1GHz
processor. Now with 6 threads all wanting something from the disk, its
going to make life complicated for a database developer.

I can see the possibility of a thread literally being starved to death for
CPU in some situations that could lead to serious synchronization
problems.