- Joined
- Mar 26, 2003
- Location
- North America
Software will be the primary problem going forward. The reason that Nehalem is so much faster 'per clock' is mostly because of the reintroduction of hyperthreading (they're now calling it MTT or Multi-Threading Technology) allows for two threads per core.
Thus, just like the old P4HT processors, certain workloads can get a measurable bump in performance if their instructions are organized in a way that can take advantage of multiple executional units in a single core.
But that requires massively multithreaded code, and hyperthreading / MTT is still not a full processing core but instead is just a way to expose other executional units that are idle while another instruction is going through. That means that not all instruction streams can be parallelized with HT / MTT, which makes it even harder to code for.
Thus, any game / app that only takes advantage of two cores at most will likely only get ~10% performance increase. But stuff like media encoding that is highly multithreaded may see gains as much as 80% over a current quad core depending on the scenario.
Now we're just talking CPU resources here; the new Nehalem architecture also brings in some massive memory bandwidth enhancements which will help LOTS of things certainly. But again, the software is truly the place where we're furthest behind.
Thus, just like the old P4HT processors, certain workloads can get a measurable bump in performance if their instructions are organized in a way that can take advantage of multiple executional units in a single core.
But that requires massively multithreaded code, and hyperthreading / MTT is still not a full processing core but instead is just a way to expose other executional units that are idle while another instruction is going through. That means that not all instruction streams can be parallelized with HT / MTT, which makes it even harder to code for.
Thus, any game / app that only takes advantage of two cores at most will likely only get ~10% performance increase. But stuff like media encoding that is highly multithreaded may see gains as much as 80% over a current quad core depending on the scenario.
Now we're just talking CPU resources here; the new Nehalem architecture also brings in some massive memory bandwidth enhancements which will help LOTS of things certainly. But again, the software is truly the place where we're furthest behind.
