Multi-core Processors: Interplay Of Hardware And Programming Models

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DXRick

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I don't get the hoopla about multi-processing. Every Windows programming book I have read on Win32, MFC, and .NET has covered the basic concepts of creating threads and thread management. There are also books devoted to the concept, for those ready to go beyond the beginner stage.

Any developer that does not learn the concepts would be in dire need of a career change.

As for this article, it is too vague to make much sense to a Windows application programmer. Maybe it would make more sense to the system programmers that wrote Windows Server 2008. Microsoft has built powerful tools into .NET that are easy to understand and use for multi-threading.
 

navvara

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Multicore processing needs to be handled at the OS level in such a manner that having 1,2,4 or 128 cores is transparent to whatever application is application running on the machine. I do hope the next version of Windows can do this as in my oppinion this is the biggest change that must be implemented in today's operating systems.

Just my 2C.
 

navvara

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Could not find the edit button....

What I meant by the above is have something similar to DirectX but for general purpose code not only for rendering. With DirectX you don't need to paralelize anything yet the rendering is performed in parallel across hundreds of vector processors. This is what I think should happen with general purpose cpu's. This will be harder to achieve than paralelizing GPU's as vectors are very easy to manipulate but it can be done. And if anyone can do it then it's Microsoft.
 

DXRick

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In DirectX 10, multi-threading support is ON by default. This means that DirectX must lock memory being accessed by the application. This has a significant impact on performance.

The hardware (Intel, AMD, & Nvidia) and software (Microsoft) folks need to work together to improve the tools used by programmers to lock/unlock memory that can be updated by more than 1 thread (concurrency issues).

I presume that this is what Intel and MS are working on.
 
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