More on Search and Multicore Processors
January 20, 2009
I poked around my collection of open source Google papers. I wanted to see if there were more information about bottlenecks in multicore CPUs but from the Google side of the street. As it happens, Mark D. Hill and Michael R. Marty wrote “Amdahl’s Law in the Multicore Era.” You can find a copy of this document from the Google Labs’s papers site or by clicking here. Mr. Hill is a professor at a Big 10 university; Mr. Marty is an engineer at Google. Like many of Google’s technical papers, the authors assume a working knowledge of certain computer processed. The paper makes clear that stuffing lots of cores on a piece of silicon does not translate to faster performance. For example, today’s chips are symmetric. The Googlers suggest asymmetric cores might be more useful. But–and there always is a “but”–the software must be adapted to the needs of the more efficient multicore design. If you use symmetric cores and traditional methods of pushing data around, bottlenecks choke performance. There are other issues identified in the paper as well. I will leave it to you to work through the analsyis and the list of other problems that require more engineering attention. After working through this paper, I had a question: “If Google is thinking about asymmetric multicore processors, will Google edge into the CPU business?”
The company does motherboards, routers, and cooling devices now. Note: Amdahl’s Law means that one fast gizmo won’t deal with bottlenecks created by other gizmos in the system. More information about Amdahl’s Law is here.
Stephen Arnold, January 19, 2009
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3 Responses to “More on Search and Multicore Processors”
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You can find a good collection of research papers and information on multicore processors at http://www.multicoreinfo.com
Suren,
Thank you for the link.
Stephen Arnold, January 20, 2009
There is a great book for C# developers looking forward to improving their applications to exploit multicore and multiprocessor systems: “C# 2008 and 2005 threaded programming”, by Gaston Hillar, Packt Publishing Ltd.
http://www.packtpub.com/beginners-guide-for-C-sharp-2008-and-2005-threaded-programming
It is packed with amazing examples useful for quad-core owners.