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Welcome to the artissimo.gr pages of News ! |
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English Language : Music Technology : News : Spring 2005 
Monday 16 May 2005 : Intel enters the dual-core processor era |
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Information Recently Intel announced the innovative technology of dual-core processors. Well, for a regular reader of high technology news who has somehow already dug into the subject, this sounds as a natural step towards evolution. The old-familiar way of getting faster CPUs (Central Processing Units) by mainly accelerating the frequency of the processor would not carry on for long : there are certain limits put there by the nature (**). Intel quickly abandoned any grandiose plans to push the GHz frequency describing internal clock as far as it gets due to various technical reasons : hard design and implementation, problems related to excessive temperature, high cost thus possibly high product risk etc. . So, the most natural step was trying to put 2 CPU cores together : that is close to having two different CPUs but is faster (due to smaller distances between the cores compared to the dual CPU model) and sounds more efficient in general than having two separate CPUs. We should mention that this technology is quite different than Hyper-Threading (used in previous generation of CPUs) : Hyper-Threading simply defined a certain level inside the physical CPU's pipeline model where there was a "logical" separation between two "logical" CPUs : this was enough to create the "impression" of 2 CPUs to all other components of a computer system, but, it simply was not any kind of much faster because almost the same elements of processing power were used : it was only the "logical" separation that "created" 2 CPUs. It is not astonishing the fact that CPUs supporting Hyper-Threading required a new operating system kernel (Windows XP) in order to present any significant boost in performance over the older generation.  On the other hand, the double core is another world : everything is doubled to the level of the frontside bus, so, the situation is not much different than having dual CPUs used : there should be a great improvement in performance without having to change operating system (especially multithreaded applications should profit most from all these). According to Intel, each one of the "CPU"s inside a double core mechanism can present itself as 2 logical CPUs due to Hyper-Threading : so, we are having 2 "physical" CPUs and 4 logical ones. In short words, CPU performances are likely to explode in the near future. Of course this will obey the well-known market rules : first models will be very expensive but the future will reserve many good kinds of surprises in terms of performance. (***) ** You remember "Quantum Mechanics" ? Chips cannot be as small as we would like them : let alone the technical difficulties of implementing so small-scaled integrated circuits. *** Such a heavy-duty processing power is likely to be used in software synthesizers simulating physical modeling and the like (remember the Synful Orchestra ?) and of course give better polyphony to every existing music production system (very useful when writing for large ensembles). However, we will end up with a system that has a super CPU power and all other elements (except perhaps for the RAM [Random Access Memory]) are seriously slowing it down. |
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