Researchers Bring Threading to Word Processing

[gogogadgetliver]

[citation][nom]zerapio[/nom]Applications shouldn't be mapping threads to cores, that's the job of the OS scheduler.[/citation]

True but applications can indeed request what processor they want. This is useful if you know contention mechanisms haven't been written into the code but you want it to at least run on a multicore box without blowing up.

In this case with Winword it looks like it's properly running on multiple CPUs. Most of the threads appear to be calls to the system for crap (ntdll for example) and those most definately would be optimized.

Say what you want about MS but they are by no means amatures at this.

..as seen on a quad core (8 logical).

If someone has Open Office handy I'd be interested to see what it's up to.

 

[Guest]

"Believe it or not, some mission-critical applications can't just leave it up to the compiler to figure out what to do with memory. Not that Word processors are ever mission critical..."
My point exactly.
"I'm just saying proper memory management and being aware of the effects of your memory usage are still good ideas."
Indeed.

However, proper memory management != manual memory management. For user applications, like word processors, that's just asking for trouble. Not to mention a poor use of resources.

C, and even assembler, have their uses but there's a reason modern programming languages are, well, modern. One of them being automatic memory management, including garbage collection.

 

[the_krasno]

Hopefully the next iteration of Open Office will have this improvement.

 

[darkguset]

That is almost exactly what AMD were trying to do about 3 years ago when they brought multithreading to the public, when they were researching how to make single-threaded applications run no multi-core processors. But it was probably too costly and time consuming (having to go against Intel all the time) so they deserted the project, at least officially.

 

[loomis86]

Wow, next they'll assign every keystroke to it's own thread...and I'll be able to type out the entire works of shakespeare in a second and a half...spellchecked, autosaved, page numbered and formatted, and sent to printer in another second and a half. Now I'll need 40,000 printers to keep up with me and a crew of 600 techs to reload paper and change ink cartridges.

Goodness, at that rate, I alone will possess more productivity than the entire nations of cuba, haiti, puerto rico, and jamaica combined.

 

[matt87_50]

wow...

if your word processor is maxing out a whole core of any processor, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG! and if the 'memory management' in your app is having any impact on performance at all, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!!!

oh wait... let me guess... they are talking about garbage collection?

great, they managed to move a big chunk of processing, that if it wasn't for LAZY CODERS, wouldn't even need to be done, onto another core! congratulations! yet another point that useless programmers can use to try and convince them selves that they aren't completely inadequate!

"oh, but its modern, and it improves productivity, its just better, get with the times!!" STFU and learn how to program! did you ever wonder how many Megawatts of electricity have been wasted around the world on your bloated program just because you were too lazy or too scared to program it properly?

oh, and lets not forget all the overhead that usually comes from making something thread safe. so while your app may now run faster, its actually become even more bloated and inefficient!

 

[MoUsE-WiZ]

[citation][nom]matt87_50[/nom]they managed to move a big chunk of processing, that if it wasn't for LAZY CODERS, wouldn't even need to be done, onto another core[/citation]
If processing power is cheaper than coder labour, what you call lazy is actually what most people call smart. Right tool for the job, ya know?

 

[Guest]

Lol another security hole for a hacker to exploit like the hyper-threading issue.

Oh Well, more core/s more power consumption. but nice find just not applicable too much for a word processor.

 

[martel80]

I thought that Word was a native application, not a garbage-collected one.

Someone mentioned that manual memory management is 1960-ish. Perhaps in your fancy .NET/Java fronted/web world but garbage collection is almost useless on the back-end since you need high availability (not some half-minute lags because the VM decides to run GC). Not to mention computer games.