Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 15th Nov 2006 20:10 UTC, submitted by Governa
"We might be ahead of Apple's product release cycle, and we've probably violated our Mac Pro's warranty, but we just had to see what the Apple Mac Pro could do when populated with a pair of Intel's brand-new quad-core Xeon 5355 processors," Daniel A. Begun reports for CNET. They conclude: "Unless you do work normally relegated to high-end workstations, perform massively multitasking workloads, or just want the bragging rights, eight cores is definitely overkill - at least for now."
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Member since:
2005-07-29
No longer will Moore's Law matter as the race for efficiently cuppled multi-core processors becomes the dominant market thrust.
We're seeing multi-core processors because of Moore's law.
Moore's law has nothing to do with clock speed. It has to do with the number of transistors available:
"the number of transistors that can be fit onto a square inch of silicon doubles every 12 months."
(Source: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/moore.ars)
Power consumption and physics acted as barriers to clock speed, but physics has not (yet) become a barrier to the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a silicon wafer.
So if transistors keep getting cheaper (because they keep getting smaller, so you can fit more of them within the same area), what do you do with all those extra transistors?
You either make your processors smaller, allowing you to create more processors at once (making them cheaper to manufacture), or you keep the processor the same physical size but place more functionality onto the processor.
Behold: multi-core processors -- placing more functionality into the processor.
It's all in keeping with Moore's law.