{"id":468,"date":"2006-11-03T12:46:33","date_gmt":"2006-11-03T20:46:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/?p=468"},"modified":"2006-11-03T12:46:33","modified_gmt":"2006-11-03T20:46:33","slug":"quad-core-chips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/2006\/11\/03\/quad-core-chips\/","title":{"rendered":"Quad Core Chips"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/news.ars\/post\/20061102-8135.html\">tons of reviews<\/a> coming out for Intel&#8217;s new Quad Core chips.  I&#8217;ve read through a few of them and repeatedly they keep saying that most applications can&#8217;t take advantage of all four cores.  They seem to suggest that unless the popular applications are re-worked to take advantage of parallel processing, more cores aren&#8217;t going to help you.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t understand why they&#8217;re saying that.  Although a benchmark would look nice if it showed some mpeg encoder run twice as fast on a quad-core chip vs. a dual core, that&#8217;s not how most people use computers.  Looking around my desktop right now I have a web browser, a mail client, several terminals and an IDE running.  Taking a look at the process list reveals that I have 96 separate processes running in the background &#8211; a web server, desktop manager, random applets in the system tray, etc.<\/p>\n<p>A real person using a computer has many programs open at once.  Just because each program can&#8217;t use multiple processes, that doesn&#8217;t mean they&#8217;re not gaining substantial benefits from having multiple processors.  I can compile some code that completely pegs one CPU, and still have another one idle so that checking e-mail is still responsive.  Each of these processes are running independently, and their work can be allocated across all four processor cores.  There is a net gain there that I have yet to see represented in any benchmark, but it would be interesting if someone bothered to do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are tons of reviews coming out for Intel&#8217;s new Quad Core chips. I&#8217;ve read through a few of them and repeatedly they keep saying that most applications can&#8217;t take advantage of all four cores. They seem to suggest that unless the popular applications are re-worked to take advantage of parallel processing, more cores aren&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-techie"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TCqO-7y","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}