Researchers Bring Threading to Word Processing

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sliem

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Awesome, now M$ can have a new product: M$ office 2010 extreme
"Experience Dual-core-utilizing word processing and power point presenter software" Boost your productivity by up to 20%! New low price for limited time only, $799.

OpenOffice dual-core-utilizing: $0
 

husker

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I never noticed any delay in a word processing or browser functionality. Mostly these applications are waiting around for user input or bottlenecked by web access. Why do they need multi-threaded code?
 

gpj

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As an app developer, this would be great built right into the compiler. Any performance improvement would be welcome. However, I dispute the 20% claim... at least as a human measurable number. Unless you're using apps like games, graphics/cad software, development tools (which the good ones are already multi-core friendly) .. most people would never realize that it took 4ms to make their title bold vs the original 5ms.

MIT huh? Big deal.
 

Cy-Kill

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What you said, "While this ability is already in use with PC games...", and what you should've said, "While this ability is already in use with some PC games..."
 

ivan_chess

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Web browsers already use a different thread for each tab (at least in the newest Firefox) so they are doing just fine on the parallelism path. Do word processor's need multiple threads? When you have a +1GHz multi-core computer are the memory management operations really that taxing?
 
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A critical advancement. Truly a banner day in the history of mankind.
 

gogogadgetliver

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[citation][nom]sliem[/nom]Awesome, now M$ can have a new product: M$ office 2010 extreme"Experience Dual-core-utilizing word processing and power point presenter software" Boost your productivity by up to 20%! New low price for limited time only, $799.OpenOffice dual-core-utilizing: $0[/citation]

MS Office is already multithreaded. Oh and btw the "M$" makes you look like you're stuck in the 90s.
 

DXRick

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You do realize that MS Word runs the spell checker in a separate thread. I would bet that auto-save also does. The rest is processing input from the user, as they type and apply various formatting things. There ain't much parallel processing going on in a word processor!
 

shin0bi272

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[citation][nom]gogogadgetliver[/nom]Uh guys. I'm looking at Winword.exe (2010) and it's already running as 26 separate threads.Maybe they are talking about Open Office or something?[/citation]

are they running on separate cores too? The article said that all the stuff gets dumped on one core too that's why I asked.
 

hellwig

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Memory management? Like garbage collection? I'm confused how you can thread processing differently than memory management. I mean, imagine the cache-misses that will be created when a different thread on a different core is jerking around with the memory you are trying to use. In other words, you can't command a memory-write on a separate thread if the processing that follows is dependent on the memory being written to.

If they are just talking about defragging and garbage collection, the compiler should already thread that out separately. Its not the programmers fault if the compiler injects memory management code right in the middle of their execution.
[citation][nom]Exodite2[/nom]Manual memory management? That's so... 1960s.[/citation]
Oh brother, that's whats wrong with computer programming today, too many kids growing up on Java. 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, I'm just saying proper memory management and being aware of the effects of your memory usage are still good ideas.
 

bildo123

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[citation][nom]husker[/nom]I never noticed any delay in a word processing or browser functionality. Mostly these applications are waiting around for user input or bottlenecked by web access. Why do they need multi-threaded code?[/citation]

The same reason we now use EFI instead of carburetors. It's just another step forward, and walking requires following one foot after the other. It may lead to something else even better.
 

bison88

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Hell yeah right on! I look forward to this multi-core, multi-threaded beast of a computer to finally get some good use hopefully in the near future!
 

zerapio

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[citation][nom]shin0bi272[/nom]are they running on separate cores too? The article said that all the stuff gets dumped on one core too that's why I asked.[/citation]
Applications shouldn't be mapping threads to cores, that's the job of the OS scheduler.
 
[citation][nom]husker[/nom]I never noticed any delay in a word processing or browser functionality. Mostly these applications are waiting around for user input or bottlenecked by web access. Why do they need multi-threaded code?[/citation]
Not really so much as multi threading, what they need to do is write more efficient code that uses less RAM!
 
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