Who said dual core only helps multimedia apps?

[xsandman]

MS Excel 2007 is multithreaded

Anyone who uses Excel to do complex calculations, simulations, or data analysis will greatly benefit. I have seen this on dual core, and it pretty much has a 100% improvement in performance (takes 1/2 the time on dual core compared to single core). I personally work with Excel on a daily basis and it takes up to 15 minutes to generate some graphs and using cerain macros. Its definitely nice to see people making multithreaded apps.

 

[chuckshissle]

Who are you accusing?

 

[xsandman]

Who are you accusing?

The usual....

If quad core shows as much improvement as dual core, i could be 4x more productive. Would definitely be nice! But there are quite a few people saying that quad core wont help much because very few programs actually take advantage of dual core. Well now we're seeing VERY popular programs become multithreaded!

 

[mark8987]

Quite frankly there are more multithreaded apps out there than what one would expect...

http://www.denniskarlsson.com/smp/

HT initiate the movement to begin threading apps at the desktop/consumer level, this will only accelerate as the industry moves to multiple physical cores.

Jack

That list is actually a lot shorter than I would have expected - especially if someone isn't doing specialized computing tasks.

 

[xsandman]

Who are you accusing?

The usual....

If quad core shows as much improvement as dual core, i could be 4x more productive. Would definitely be nice! But there are quite a few people saying that quad core wont help much because very few programs actually take advantage of dual core. Well now we're seeing VERY popular programs become multithreaded!

Quite frankly there are more multithreaded apps out there than what one would expect...

http://www.denniskarlsson.com/smp/

HT initiate the movement to begin threading apps at the desktop/consumer level, this will only accelerate as the industry moves to multiple physical cores.

Jack

Shit is definitely changing, but when MS includes it in one of their bigger apps for consumers, you know things are changing. It can definitely be an inflection point.

 

[maury73]

Dual Cores don's improve multimedia apps, it improve every app that uses multiple threads, like Excel when it recalculates graphs and sheets, because it launches several threads in parallel.

Even in multimedia you'll notice no improve at all if you don't use a multithreaded application-

The summary is: dual cores don't improve particular class of applications, they simply improve multithreaded applications, this is the key.

 

[xsandman]

Dual Cores don's improve multimedia apps, it improve every app that uses multiple threads, like Excel when it recalculates graphs and sheets, because it launches several threads in parallel.

Even in multimedia you'll notice no improve at all if you don't use a multithreaded application-

The summary is: dual cores don't improve particular class of applications, they simply improve multithreaded applications, this is the key.

Well, of course, this is the basic concept of multi-threaded apps. But currently multi-media apps are the ones that are taking full advantage of multi-threading. This is due to the nature of multi-media data and calculations.

The current version of excel does not support multi-threading, only the 2007 version. And it is possible to launch multiple threads in parallel since every datapoint can be launched as a thread. If you're doing one calculation to 500 data points, this calculation can be done as indepentant threads on each data point. Same can be used for creating graphs. Probably not too complex to program since these calculations do not depend on each other at all, but still needs to be programmed into the application.