Oh, oh, Multicore CPUs Have Bottlenecks
January 17, 2009
Last year a wizard at a well-known search and content processing company was singing the praises of the multi-core Intel CPUs. AMD is in this game along with a handful of other companies. But the wizard was focused on Intel and the speed up the high-density multi-core chips would deliver. I listen to these excited explanations of how hardware will solve some of the performance issues associated with content processing, but I have learned that throwing hardware at a software problem is not 100 percent reliable. But it is an easy out for the information technology unit and it makes the hardware vendors really happy.
But The Register ran a story here on January 15, 2009, that suggests multi core processor technology is not the next big thing the search engine wizard hoped it would be. You can read “US Nuke Boffins” Multicore CPU Gains Stop at Eight”. (Boffin is a British word that means wizards. I will stick with wizards. A boffin in rural Kentucky would have a tough time at the local Harrod’s Creek hang out.) If the US “boffins” are correct, putting more cores on a CPU creates a data log jam. Big surprise. Moving data is not easy or fast even for “boffins”.
What’s this mean for search? Well, not much. Slow systems will remain slow. Fast systems will take advantage of two and four core CPUs. When eight core CPUs become cheap enough for mere mortals, then the GOOG will stuff them into their servers and go faster. To get the real payoff, Intel and other chip gurus will have to do some lateral thinking. The blending of dedicated CPUs with special memory structures sort of along the lines of the original PS3 chip might be a fruitful path to explore. IBM has some other tricks to try as well.
But for search systems with computational burdens, well, those systems will remain expensive to accelerate.
Stephen Arnold, January 17, 2009
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