Friday, December 28, 2007

640K Is Enough For Anyone, 64 Cores is Enough For Anyone, Windows Cannot Handle More Than 64 Cores At The Moment

It is déjà vu all over again, someone decided that 64 cores is enough for everyone and Windows currently cannot handle the 80 core Intel CPUs when they come out.

To carry out multitasking, Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 sometimes move process threads among different processors. Although efficient from an operating system point of view as each processor cache is repeatedly reloaded with data.
Assigning processors to specific threads can improve performance under these conditions by eliminating processor reloads and reducing thread migration across processors (thereby reducing context switching); such an association between a thread and a processor is called processor affinity.

I guess your Data Parallel Haskell or Parallel LINQ(PLINQ) will have to wait for another version of Windows to take advantage of 80 cores :-(

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