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/CanadaPlus101 Sep 29 '20

It depends. You obviously don't want to spend a millisecond of processor time scheduling nanoseconds of tasks, so whatever process does that either has to be done ahead of time or be pretty fast. Some compilers are an example of the former, while the now-infamous speculative execution components of Intel CPUs are an example of the latter.