Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider) [LWN.net]

Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

Posted Sep 14, 2009 20:56 UTC (Mon) by Tomislav (guest, #56442)
In reply to: Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider) by malor
Parent article: Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

> At the rate things are going, we're going to have
> desktops with 256 cores within 10 years.

I wouldn't count on it. We are getting close to the physical boundaries in the photolithography technology so there would have to be a real revolution in the manufacturing process if this is to be. Clock speeds have remained around 2.5-3.5 GHz for a while now and it's doubtful that having more than 6-8 cores on the desktop is useful enough to offset the cost of such chips.

to post comments

Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

Posted Sep 14, 2009 23:31 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, that's true if the core size stays the same and the cores stay homogeneous. GPUs already have 100s of simple cores, and stuff like OpenCL allows your multithreaded, vectorizable app to run on such a heterogeneous setup today. Technologies such as Larrabee blur this further, putting dozens of simple x86 ISA cores out there.

I think you're right that you won't see 256 i7-class CPUs in a computer. I think you're wrong that you won't see 256 application processors in a computer. You will probably have a couple beefy CPUs for the single-threaded portions, and lots of simpler processors to sop of the rest.

Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

Posted Sep 14, 2009 23:35 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

Errr... sop *up* the rest.