So I'm surfing the net, and I read this:

http://tinyurl.com/lls9hh

So there are hex-core Operons now, eh? And HP are planning to ship them?

Obviously, I immediately wondered where you buy an 8-socket HP server 
populated with hex-core Operons, and what such a beast would cost.

http://tinyurl.com/mfpfxu

So we don't know yet. However, it's little brother is listed "starting 
at" $16,999.00. (As far as I can tell, the principle difference is that 
the G5 takes quad-core Operons, while the G6 does hex-core.) So I think 
we can safely assume this is out of my price range.



In other news... Some of HP's other servers are actually not as 
expensive as you'd think, considering the horsepower.

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Invisible wrote:

> In other news... Some of HP's other servers are actually not as 
> expensive as you'd think, considering the horsepower.

...for example:

http://tinyurl.com/lrkzto


server. Not too shabby, eh?

Of course, this is quite silly. If I buy a desktop system instead, I can 
probably get similarly impressive CPU performance *and* have somewhere 
to put my expensive GPU. ;-) But, for reasons unknown, desktop 
motherboards never support multiple CPUs...

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> So there are hex-core Operons now, eh?

  I'm wondering: What do people do with so many cores? And I'm talking about
average people, not people who use POV-Ray 3.7 (who are a rather small
minority).

  About the only usage for multiple cores for the masses (rather than for
very small niche markets) is computer games which support multithreading.

  However, I wonder if anyone has actually benchmarked how well current
multithreading-supporting games scale up with increased amount of cores
(and processors). Expecting that doubling the number of cores will double
the refresh rate of the game is completely unrealistic wishful thinking.
I would be curious to know if anyone has actually benchmarked how much
games *really* benefit from additional cores.

  What I'm getting at is that if, let's say, increasing the amount of
cores from 2 to 6 only about doubles the refresh rate of the game, that's
kind of wasted resources and wasted money. It's like having 2 cores being
idle all the time.

  And of course there's a point after which a game will not benefit at
all from increased speed. A game refreshing at 100FPS or at 150FPS makes
absolutely no practical difference.

  So what do people need so many cores for? Not everyone uses them for
multithreaded rendering or video editing.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> So there are hex-core Operons now, eh?
> 
>   I'm wondering: What do people do with so many cores? And I'm talking about
> average people, not people who use POV-Ray 3.7 (who are a rather small
> minority).
> 
<snip>
>   So what do people need so many cores for? Not everyone uses them for
> multithreaded rendering or video editing.
> 
Who cares what they use them for? The more people buying them, the lower
the price gets to you and me :-)

<Marketing> C'mon suckers, buy your redundant cores now. Be the first on
your block to watch YouTube on our new dodecacore Hyperon! </Marketing>

John
-- 
"Eppur si muove" - Galileo Galilei

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Warp wrote:

>   I'm wondering: What do people do with so many cores? And I'm talking about
> average people, not people who use POV-Ray 3.7 (who are a rather small
> minority).

Indeed, where I work we have all these shiny new Dell OptiPlex 755 
systems with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz CPUs... and we use them to run 
Word and Excel.

Over 10 years ago, I was running Word and Excel with 486 and Pentium I 
processors. That *was* actually kind of underpowered. But we passed the 
point of being underpowered quite some time ago. Excel isn't notably 
faster on a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo than it is on the dinosaur AMD AthlonXP 
1700+ at my desk. And that's a single-core, 32-bit CPU.

Most of the PCs round here, it seems, are in fact limited by RAM 
capacity, HD access speed, and most significantly network latency. 
Downloading a 200 MB Word document takes a while no matter what CPU you 
have.

>   About the only usage for multiple cores for the masses (rather than for
> very small niche markets) is computer games which support multithreading.

Yeah, just about.

>   However, I wonder if anyone has actually benchmarked how well current
> multithreading-supporting games scale up with increased amount of cores
> (and processors).

I think Tom's Hardware has taken a look at this kind of thing on 
occasion, yes.

> Expecting that doubling the number of cores will double
> the refresh rate of the game is completely unrealistic wishful thinking.

Yes, "most" games are GPU-limited.

> I would be curious to know if anyone has actually benchmarked how much
> games *really* benefit from additional cores.

I don't have the benchmarks to hand, but I'm fairly sure Tom's Hardware 
has looked at this once or twice. (E.g., I vaguely recall an article 
about whether you should upgrade your CPU or your GPU, and which would 
give you the most improvement for the same money.)

>   And of course there's a point after which a game will not benefit at
> all from increased speed. A game refreshing at 100FPS or at 150FPS makes
> absolutely no practical difference.

Ah, but you're forgetting the first rule of 3D graphics: If you add more 
processing power, people will invent new ways to sap it until the thing 
slows to a crawl.

Exhibit A: Crysis.

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Doctor John wrote:

> Who cares what they use them for? The more people buying them, the lower
> the price gets to you and me :-)

Bahaha! Dude, that's evil.

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Invisible wrote:
> Doctor John wrote:
> 
>> Who cares what they use them for? The more people buying them, the lower
>> the price gets to you and me :-)
> 
> Bahaha! Dude, that's evil.

Evil, moi?
Twisted, maybe, but evil, never }:->

John
-- 
"Eppur si muove" - Galileo Galilei

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Warp schrieb:
>   I'm wondering: What do people do with so many cores? And I'm talking about
> average people, not people who use POV-Ray 3.7 (who are a rather small
> minority).

Damn, and I was already about to hit the "reply" button to answer that 
perfectly obvious question :-)

Well, so what might /others/ do with such fast computers...

Brag about them?
Hope for games to support them at last?

Can't think of much else.

>   And of course there's a point after which a game will not benefit at
> all from increased speed. A game refreshing at 100FPS or at 150FPS makes
> absolutely no practical difference.

Forget about that: Computer games are like POV-Ray scenes - they 
invariably grow with the available computing power, to bog it down again 
to exactly that speed where it's /barely/ acceptable...

There's always stuff to improve you know. If they'd find nothing else, 
they'd go for realtime subsurface scattering and crash-test-quality 
physics simulation...

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>  I'm wondering: What do people do with so many cores? And I'm talking 
> about
> average people, not people who use POV-Ray 3.7 (who are a rather small
> minority).

Nothing, they just buy them because it sounds better than before (after all, 
they can't make the clock rate much higher anymore).  A bit like how a phone 
with a 5MP camera sells better than one with a 2MP camera, even though the 
photos are just as crappy and you can hardly blow it up to A4 to print out.

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Doctor John wrote:

> 
> <Marketing> C'mon suckers, buy your redundant cores now. Be the first on
> your block to watch YouTube on our new dodecacore Hyperon! </Marketing>

I want one!

-- 
~Mike

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