coming pc tech

hey ho all,
I have been looking ahead at descriptions of the coming dual core processors
and I have a few questions that maybe someone can help me with...

1) I presume SW performance will not benefit from dual cores at all? but I
will be able to run 2 engineering applications simultaneously provided I
have say 4gb ram- practically limited to 1.5gb each?

2) Is 4 ghz now a general reliability limit? ...so now we have multiple
cores (2-4-8?)rather than scalability? ...so although power requirements
will go down with each nm shrink speeds wont change much for linear appl
like SW?

that is...SW will really not be running any faster in the future than it is
now on an Intel box and when AMD get to ghz say 2 years after the dual core
launch of 2.ghz that's it too??

do I have this right...
neil

 

hmmm, ok...well I was thinking I could take advantage of a dual core to run
a SW session and also have Blender doing an animation render at the same
time but if its going to be clocked slower well maybe not.
I would expect that type of exercise could soak up 2gb ram and 2gb page file
fairly readily...it isn't clear to me how page file access would be
compromised with 2 large hungry applications...I guess you would need
another disk just for the page file...can a pf be split up??don't
know...maybe multi core is more suited to domestic purposes.

It would seem unlikely that SW will be in any hurry to pick up multi core
given that they haven't really got into multi threads...64 bit doesn't seem
to be coming either...plus I think Intel sort of made a right angle turn on
multi core so I don't know that anything would have been in the SW pipeline
concerning that.

Maybe I will just wait a bit and see how it all pans out, but it does seem
from what I read that workstn performance really isn't going ahead like I
imagined...

cheers
neil

 

Think things like graphics & analysis.
Clearly there will be new compilers to recompile
things with.

In addition, expect better with probably more buffers
& memory on the CPU and shorter signal paths & perhaps
wider busses.

Should be info on Intel's Site ... I did not look.

 

Dual core doens't even have much effect on running multiple
applications. I run long FEA analysis while running SW. Except for the
memory limitations I don't even know the FEA analysis is running when I
set its priority to low in Task Manager. And given that applications
that require user input get priority when they are being used there is
little incentive for running multiple apps on a dually unless you like
going into Task Manager all the time and setting affinity for each app.
Unlike *nixes, Windoze has never had an elegant way to set task
priority on the fly. The rule is still get the fastest CPU possible.

As Dale mentioned, PhotoWorks utilizes multiple CPUs, but it is not
because of multiple threads. It is because the solution to the ray
tracing algorithm can be spread among many processors and the people
who wrote the software took advantage of that. You may have heard the
term rendering farm even before PW came along. A rendering farm is a
room full of fast processors all working on one frame of a rendering.

 

This is probably the case with any 3D graphics application,
such as SW.
I'd think that the "solving" of BREP solids would also apply
as many edges & faces could also be so computed by the
kernel.

Anyone know more or better? Nobody actually from SW
development/support lurking?

 

well this has me confused....why are chip manufacturers going to multi core
then?
software that can't use it ...applications that aren't suited to it...hassle
of managing it??
from what I have seen of the roadmaps single processors are being phased
out...and the GHz is staying static...and it seems unfortunately SW isn't
going to get any faster any time soon no matter what hardware you buy...

thinking about it though...surely the bios is going to auto assign new tasks
to a different core...and each core will have a page file of its
own?...presently if I have a render running it consumes 100% of processor
time and trying to get access to some of that time to do something else as
well is a long unresponsive wait....isn't this what multi core is all
about?..it's not feeding the stack...its not distributing calcs...its multi
tasking isn't it??

yes I am aware of render farms...Blender uses multi threading and shortly
will use multi processors for both it's scanline and GI render
engines....and someone is working on internet distributed rendering as well
as networked renders (farm)...however I was interested in utilising spare
time on my single pc and being able do 2 activities at once....dual core had
seemed like a good way to do that...

neil

 

Certain portions of the solution to a SW model do use multiple
processors. But it is not enough to make an appreciable difference in
speed. I think if they went to an associative scheme and away from
parametrics they could use multi processing to better effect.

They could also go to redesigning the feature tree and solve the
branches separately.

 

so what it all amounts to is that multi core is a dud...and SW speed has
topped out..
...oh well back to the drawing board..
thanks for your replies
neil

 

In 8 years of using I-DEAS, my favorite feature was the "bushy" history tree, where branches
could be suppressed. Each branch was essentially a separate part attached by a Boolean join
with constraints. When a branch was completed, it could be suppressed until needed for the
final rebuild.

Could it be that multiple bodies in SW would offer similar results (i.e. suppress the ones
you don't need at the moment)? I'll have to play with this.

 

You can use folders in SW to accomplish this without multibodies.
Starting from the base feature create a branch, put the branch in a
folder and suppress the folder or roll back to before the folder. Then
work on another branch and do the same. One problem you run into is
that some features don't do history very well. Typical would be
surfaces and Move/Copy features. Anyway, when done the last folder is
the first branch, the second last is the second and so on. Using this
method does speed up modeling becuase everything but what you are
currently working on is suppressed. But there ain't no free lunch here
when it comes to the endgame when everything is unsuppressed.