Items tagged with Multi-thread
Want to scare the life out of a programmer friend? Just utter the words "multi-threading" into their ear - it works every time! Alright - that's a bit of an exaggeration, but writing multi-threaded code is one of the biggest challenges a programmer can ever face. The reason boils down to the fact that for the longest time, everyone wrote code that best-suited single-core processors - which just happened to get faster every year. When we reached the peak of processor frequency a number of years ago, multi-core processors became the only way to move forward. While these CPUs are excellent for getting big jobs done fast, they've proven to be a nightmare for programmers who have to spend a lot...
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Yesterday, news broke regarding Microsoft and Intel launching parallel research centers at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to investigate way to accelerate developments in mainstream parallel computing. And today, we've posted some details and commentary on the subject over at HotHardware. Here's a snip from the piece... "Even today, writing software able to take advantage of multi-threading is notoriously difficult. In order to help drive the development of the tools and threading-aware applications, Microsoft and Intel are together awarding the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley $10 million dollars...
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It's no secret that the days of procuring performance exclusively through faster clock speeds are over. The current crop of multi-core server, desktop, and mobile CPU designs are a dead giveaway that processor vendors like Intel are instead looking to increased parallelism as the facilitator of more computing horsepower. The problem, according to David Patterson, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, becomes one of scheduling and balancing workloads across multiple sets of processing resources, so that you can truly get more performance out of those threaded designs. If an application is only running in one thread, upgrading to a dual- or quad-core chip won't help speed it up. It's a...
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