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Warp wrote:
> Most of the "big" game engines (especially the Unreal Engine) support
> multithreading today,
Heck, even XNA supports it on the xbox. It's a bit funky to get it set up -
you have to create a thread, assign the thread to a core (some of which are
reserved), and then run the thread, and that thread never changes cores. But
it's supported if you want to do (say) physics on one core and rendering on
another.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Serving Suggestion:
"Don't serve this any more. It's awful."
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On 17/11/2010 11:55 PM, Darren New wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
>> Aside from embarassingly parallel tasks like raytracing,
>
> That and media encoding are the only programs I've used in a decade that
> peg more than one CPU.
How about stuff like web servers and database engines? Granted that
tends to be limited more by I/O then computer power, but don't those
routinely use multiple cores? (Obviously these are not usually *desktop*
applications...)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible wrote:
> Presumably it's hard to balance work evenly. Then there's the problem of
> cache coherence if you try to do too much balancing. (I.e., if the data
> you want is in the cache on core X, trying to process that data from
> core Y is *slower* than not using an extra thread.)
Not only cache. With increasing numbers of cores, you will have that problem
with main memory too; read up on NUMA.
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> On 17/11/2010 11:55 PM, Darren New wrote:
>> nemesis wrote:
>>> Aside from embarassingly parallel tasks like raytracing,
>>
>> That and media encoding are the only programs I've used in a decade that
>> peg more than one CPU.
>
> How about stuff like web servers and database engines?
Web servers usually use multiple processes. Database engines I suppose if
your entire database is in RAM would peg the CPUs if you thrashed at it hard
enough, sure. I never pegged a database that hard, tho.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Serving Suggestion:
"Don't serve this any more. It's awful."
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nemesis wrote:
> essentially single threaded,
How about photoshop(TM)? The cheap photo manipulation programs are
single-threaded, but does photoshop use all four cores when you do something
where that makes sense (like smoothing or contrast adjust or something
highly parallelizable)? I don't own a copy, so I can't tell.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Serving Suggestion:
"Don't serve this any more. It's awful."
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On 19/11/2010 02:22 AM, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Presumably it's hard to balance work evenly. Then there's the problem of
>> cache coherence if you try to do too much balancing. (I.e., if the data
>> you want is in the cache on core X, trying to process that data from
>> core Y is *slower* than not using an extra thread.)
>
> Not only cache. With increasing numbers of cores, you will have that problem
> with main memory too; read up on NUMA.
Well, yes, with multiple cores and multiple levels of caching, your
computer system basically ends up being NUMA in all but name anyway. The
difference is, in a real NUMA system, the system doesn't *pretend* that
it offers uniform access time. And that means you can control where
stuff gets put to optimise access speed.
Now, optimising data placement is a seriously hard problem, I would
imagine. (Somebody once wrote "a supercomputer is a device for turning a
compute-bound problem into an I/O-bound problem".)
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Darren New escreveu:
> nemesis wrote:
>> essentially single threaded,
>
> How about photoshop(TM)? The cheap photo manipulation programs are
> single-threaded, but does photoshop use all four cores when you do
> something where that makes sense (like smoothing or contrast adjust or
> something highly parallelizable)? I don't own a copy, so I can't tell.
I don't own a copy either. In fact, I don't see why any image
manipulation program wouldn't do their turf on many GPU cores instead...
--
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9
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nemesis wrote:
> I don't own a copy either. In fact, I don't see why any image
> manipulation program wouldn't do their turf on many GPU cores instead...
That too, assuming you *have* a GPU. Do laptops have decent GPUs these
days? I know there are a lot of machines with Intel built-in graphics type
stuff using normal system memory for the graphics memory, but I don't know
if that means they're not 3D-accelerated ornot.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Serving Suggestion:
"Don't serve this any more. It's awful."
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>> I don't own a copy either. In fact, I don't see why any image
>> manipulation program wouldn't do their turf on many GPU cores instead...
>
> That too, assuming you *have* a GPU. Do laptops have decent GPUs these
> days? I know there are a lot of machines with Intel built-in graphics
> type stuff using normal system memory for the graphics memory, but I
> don't know if that means they're not 3D-accelerated ornot.
My laptop has a "nVidia GeForce 8200 Mobile GPU".
Key phrase being "mobile"... It does play CounterStrike: Source, however.
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Invisible wrote:
>>> I don't own a copy either. In fact, I don't see why any image
>>> manipulation program wouldn't do their turf on many GPU cores instead...
>>
>> That too, assuming you *have* a GPU. Do laptops have decent GPUs these
>> days? I know there are a lot of machines with Intel built-in graphics
>> type stuff using normal system memory for the graphics memory, but I
>> don't know if that means they're not 3D-accelerated ornot.
>
> My laptop has a "nVidia GeForce 8200 Mobile GPU".
>
> Key phrase being "mobile"... It does play CounterStrike: Source, however.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA
It looks like even the cheap integrated graphics chips do DirectX9, so I
guess you could pretty much rely on pixel shaders for photoshop.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Serving Suggestion:
"Don't serve this any more. It's awful."
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