Ask HN: Is Multi-core a thing of the past?
3 points
1 hour ago
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Modern CPUs e.g XEON 6 have 144 cores, 144 threads - which to me seems a heavy misalignment between the hardware engineers making the CPUs & the software engineers using the CPUs.

on the software side - in distributed systems - most systems when containerized assume they're gonna be utilizing one CPU core in a horizontally distributed manner i.e many pods etc. the other pods could be on different machines.

then the language platforms e.g JVM, Golang, JS are going the route of green threads/event loops which take advantage of the 1 platform thread to its maximum advantage.

the only software systems to my knowledge that can take advantage of the massive CPUs we see these days are either the massive DBs - but then even those have gone the way of separating Storage & Compute.

Unless maybe the CPU vendors - are making these powerful CPUs knowing they will be rented by the thread ?

what does everyone think ?

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edude03
1 hour ago
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We can't make single cores any faster, so realistically multicore is the only "solution". That said, most languages have M:N event loops, where M tasks are distributed across N OS threads so even if your software doesn't directly use multiple cores, you end up using them indirectly for example for IO to the database or other APIs.
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elar_verole
1 hour ago
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>Unless maybe the CPU vendors - are making these powerful CPUs knowing they will be rented by the thread

I think you answered your question already. AWS buys it -> you get instances that use a small part of the huge CPUs basically.

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