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#1
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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! |
#2
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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. |
#3
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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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