Amdahal's Law says hello.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_lawIf we keep scaling up number of processors rather than clock speed, what is going to be the maximum number useful cores in a laptop or desktop? 20? 100? 1000? At some point adding more cores is going to make no difference to the user experience, but the way we are going we'll be at 1000 cores in about a decade so we better start thinking about it now.
Or to put it another way, what normal workloads will load up all the cores in the new M1 chip?
Being a software developer, compiling things is the obvious choice, except when you come to that rather serial linking phase at the end of the compile job. Already my incremental Go compiles are completely dominated by the linking phase.
There are a few easy to parallelise tasks, mostly to do with media (as it says in the article). However a lot of stuff isn't like that. Will 20 cores speed up my web browser? How about Excel?
Your average user is going to prefer double the clock rate of your processors to doubling the number of processors.
Anyway, I don't want to rain on Apple's parade with these musings - the M1 Ultra is an amazing achievement and it certainly isn't for your average user. I wish I had one in a computer of my choice running Linux!
If we keep scaling up number of processors rather than clock speed, what is going to be the maximum number useful cores in a laptop or desktop? 20? 100? 1000? At some point adding more cores is going to make no difference to the user experience, but the way we are going we'll be at 1000 cores in about a decade so we better start thinking about it now.
Or to put it another way, what normal workloads will load up all the cores in the new M1 chip?
Being a software developer, compiling things is the obvious choice, except when you come to that rather serial linking phase at the end of the compile job. Already my incremental Go compiles are completely dominated by the linking phase.
There are a few easy to parallelise tasks, mostly to do with media (as it says in the article). However a lot of stuff isn't like that. Will 20 cores speed up my web browser? How about Excel?
Your average user is going to prefer double the clock rate of your processors to doubling the number of processors.
Anyway, I don't want to rain on Apple's parade with these musings - the M1 Ultra is an amazing achievement and it certainly isn't for your average user. I wish I had one in a computer of my choice running Linux!