Comments on: Applications that can make use of more compute power (e.g., iPod Video)

By: Jakob

Jakob — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:53:51 +0000

Seems like a couple of spam comments got in here. Interesting bot posts. I leave them in, the links are marked “no follow” anyway and will not boost their search engine rankings.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 02:36:38 +0000

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Applications that can make use of more compute power (e.g., iPod Video), but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

By: Girl

Girl — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 23:42:34 +0000

Hmm..
It seems to be interesting…

By: Jakob

Jakob — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:07:05 +0000

Thanks! Good point, I guess the Intel reply here would be that on a PC, you would not have little accelerator engines for anything you might conceive doing. Rather, you need to have a general-purpose CPU that can do most things decently — if in a rather inefficient manner. I know that video encoding is not important enough to me that I would buy an add-in card or external hardware to help do it. I want it done on the general-purpose machine I already have for other purposes.

Polaris I believe is now becoming a graphics processing unit really, competing with offerings from Nvidia and AMD/ATI. But I guess it would solve my H.264 issue quite nicely too, at a much lower energy expenditure for a movie.

By: Jan TÃ¥ngring

Jan TÃ¥ngring — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 06:44:46 +0000

H.264 encoding is 1000 times more efficient on dedicated hardware than on any single core cpu of today. Maybe the question to Intel should be “what do you need more x86-cores for?”

I am still looking for the “killer x86-multicore app”. Radio baseband, video, graphics, networking stacks, encryption – everything comes on dedicated hardware with at least a 100 times more performance than a single core cpu. Or on reconfigurable logic with ten times the performance.

Intels Terascale computing group is actually talking “special purpose processors” now, and “reconfigurable co processors”. Their current 80 core Polaris test chip has no x86:s at all, only 80 x 2 floating point engines. Ok, that doesn’t prove anthing about their future plans; Polaris was just the quickest way for them to reach their subgoal of “1 teraflops on a standard cpu power budget”. But I think that the total area of x86 cores on future manycore chips is going to go down.