[Openmcl-devel] Octal-core Mac Pro

[Hamilton Link]

Phil wrote:

>I  
>suspect a growing number of users will appreciate what multi-core  
>gets them (without changes in their apps... excluding things like  
>games and media authoring apps which need to change sooner rather  
>than later) until they get to 4 or even 8 cores on a mainstream  
>system.  Then, yes some apps (or at the very least, the OS and the  
>services it provides) will need to change significantly to recognize  
>further benefits.
>
I read an article the other day in SciAm about some new approaches to 
speeding up rendering, I suspect 3d games are going to embrace 
multi-core very rapidly relatively soon to realize the advantages of 
game-speed ray tracing.  Plus the game industry doesn't have the kind of 
backward-compatability issues of most of the rest of the software world, 
so they have always been a little more dynamic when it comes to 
exploiting new technology.

I suspect a lot of those extra cycles will be also useful for doing 
parallel semantic checking in software, to head of security problems and 
bugs.  So, Microsoft Word might not be obviously more threaded than now, 
but there will be little supervisor threads tracking the abstract state 
of that app to head off buffer overflows and the like.

h