Re: Treads in the new 6 core CPU from Intel

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.