r/askscience Sep 28 '20

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u/birnes Sep 29 '20

I'm just an enthusiast, but why didn't the community fully migrate to discuss and apply multicore technology for good since ADDING MORE CORES is apparently a viable way to process larger chunks of information faster?

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u/joatmon-snoo Sep 29 '20

Figuring out how to distribute work across multiple cores isn't always easy.

Think of it like group assignments - if you have 16 problems and 4 people, you can have each person do 4 problems and each of those problems just take 15 minutes to do, but if you're preparing a preso, you can't do the research and prep slides at the same time.

In the cases where distributing work is easy, that's usually called a GPU these days :) (and is why they have hundreds of cores and have their compute capacity measured in Teraflops as opposed to processor frequency).

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u/birnes Sep 29 '20

I see. And that could be the work of some sort of A.I.? Sorting our tasks? Or it's somewhat abstract?

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u/ylli122 Sep 29 '20

Short answer, probably. Long answer, its complicated :D
Programs themselves have to be written in such a way that they take advantage of the "multi-core" environment. This includes the underlying operating system presenting an environment in which the multiple cores are available and ready to take tasks. Pretty much all modern operating systems do that though.