• 4 cores

    From micky@21:1/5 to All on Fri Nov 20 03:42:49 2020
    One of the watchwords of computers used to be that they only do one
    thing at a time, and they just switch from one thing to another very
    quickly.

    However, now that cpu's have 2 or 4 cores or more, is that still true?

    Does my cpu with 4 cores do up to 4 things at the same time?


    Then, if it's supposed to make sounds, more than one core can make
    sounds at the same time, right?

    But if it's supposed to print something or make an image on the screen,
    it can only make one at a time!

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  • From John McGaw@21:1/5 to micky on Fri Nov 20 08:54:58 2020
    On 11/20/2020 3:42 AM, micky wrote:
    One of the watchwords of computers used to be that they only do one
    thing at a time, and they just switch from one thing to another very
    quickly.

    However, now that cpu's have 2 or 4 cores or more, is that still true?

    Does my cpu with 4 cores do up to 4 things at the same time?


    Then, if it's supposed to make sounds, more than one core can make
    sounds at the same time, right?

    But if it's supposed to print something or make an image on the screen,
    it can only make one at a time!

    Guess that depends on what you are doing at the time. With some programs
    every core available may be used for a single task -- video and image tools
    for example. With other programs, yeah, you could be processing four
    different tasks, literally simultaneously but making allowance for shared resources like memory and disk holding one or more of them up temporarily.
    Or so I understand it. With Intel Hyperthreading you might be doing, well almost, eight separate tasks at least at times (my casual testing suggests
    that I'm getting maybe 1.6 per core on some compute-heavy tasks like BOINC jobs).

    --
    Bodger's Dictum: Artifical intelligence
    can never overcome natural stupidity.

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  • From Paul@21:1/5 to micky on Fri Nov 20 12:51:21 2020
    micky wrote:
    One of the watchwords of computers used to be that they only do one
    thing at a time, and they just switch from one thing to another very
    quickly.

    However, now that cpu's have 2 or 4 cores or more, is that still true?

    Does my cpu with 4 cores do up to 4 things at the same time?


    Then, if it's supposed to make sounds, more than one core can make
    sounds at the same time, right?

    But if it's supposed to print something or make an image on the screen,
    it can only make one at a time!

    The cores can do things simultaneously.

    You have four computer cores, but only one DRAM bus.

    It means the cores have to be served in some sort of
    order. If two cores ask for RAM at the same time,
    they can't be served at the same time. They take
    turns. And the scheme for taking turns has a name,
    first come first serve, round robin, strict priority,
    and so on.

    For printing, printing is serialized by the usage of
    a spooler (queues up print jobs) and a print server
    (does the printing). No user program is allowed to
    drive the printer directly. Some hardware devices
    don't have sufficient interlocks to prevent hardware
    damage, and only the proprietary driver knows the
    correct sequence and timing.

    Sound uses the Windows sound mixer, that allows digital
    mixing and summation of multiple signals, before they
    get to the stereo speakers. Sound is handled in bunches,
    rather than single samples. For example, if the sound
    driver had to trigger forty four thousand one hundred
    times a second, the wheels would fall off. But if
    asked to handle forty four buffers of one thousand
    samples each, there is less performance loss due to
    entering and leaving the mixing routine. And blocks of
    sound samples are transported to the buffer on the
    sound card, via DMA and ring buffers or the like.

    Some things do happen truly simultaneously, but there
    are also a lot of choreographed dance routines in
    there, where serialization is occurring.

    Paul

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