How Many Cores Do We Need?
Anwar Ghuloum is a Principal Engineer with Intel’s Microprocessor Technology Lab, and recently wrote a blog post titled Unwelcome Advice. He proposes that developers should start thinking now about using hundreds or thousands of cores.This has gotten some web coverage at places like slashdot.
In the film industry we do have many problems that parallelize very well. Physical simulations is one example that people are often familiar with using parallel processing. Rendering is an extremely good example because we can often get parallelism not only within a single image, but because a film is made up of many images, we get additional parallelization by processing multiple images at the same time. My company, Digital Ordnance, builds a high performance image capture and play back system. We take advantage of both CPU and GPU parallelism quite heavily in our systems.
But, the thing that struck me about the post, is that concept that large numbers of cores are applicable to a wide audience. I’m really not convinced that’s true.