Monday, November 22, 2010

How much voltage does your program need?

Apparently Intel thinks they can create CPUs with up to 1000 cores. It'll be interesting to see how much of a change this will spur in Computer Science and Software Engineering.

I know some schools are already teaching multi threaded algorithms and concurrency. I can see this becoming more and more important in the future. I am getting really excited for the concurrency course at Waterloo.

Also, the Intel cores contain hooks that let you change the voltage to the cores. This sounds like yet another crazy thing for programmer's to consider in the future. I used to think that these issues were stupid. How much could they possibly reduce it by? Who cares how much voltage your CPUs are using? Google does. Saving 1% of CPU voltage will save the company thousands and thousands of dollars. It's pretty crazy.

Anyway, 4 assignments left in 2 weeks. Woo! OS an DB are both due in less than two weeks. Why does the end of the school year have to be so busy?

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