Just how fast is that new PC or Mac under your desk, was that wad of money laid out on Intel’s latest and greatest processor well spent?

Probably not. Despite the quad core, multi-pipelining caching capabilities pushed at you, your software won’t be using it. It just doesn’t know how. That’s the dummy you’ve been sold, that’s the con-trick.

The big software players just want to sell you interface gimmicks and ill-conceived features you’ll never use. They don’t care about the real power in your processor and never have. It’s all a total waste of time – and your money.

The core of the matter

There’s an expression that goes “Andy gives and Bill takes away”, referring to the head of Intel giving us faster processors and the (then) head of Microsoft making software that runs so slowly you get no improvement.

The problem with progress is things just keep getting faster. Processors used to be based around a single core which ran as fast as the material they were then made from allowed.

Speed Kills

Inevitably, there came a point when it just couldn’t be pushed any faster. It generated so much heat that it would be in danger of meltdown. The processor would simply fry.

Then someone came up with the idea of placing multiple cores into the one processor chip. This gave the chip manufacturers breathing space. By running two cores, each could run at a safer, slower speed. The software would magically split into two and runs tasks in parallel, to be joined up again when completed. Well, that’s the theory.

The thing is, very little software can run like this. Sure, some tasks can split, but rarely are such tasks of equal length or even that predictable, so if they can be split, one will finish too soon, or too late and the dreaded “wait states” appear – idle time when processors are idle, waiting for the next core to catch up. And things are getting worse.

Some simple maths

The processor companies like Intel, IBM and AMD are locked in a speed battle. They are turning to faster advertised speeds to win market share. But this can only be achieved by adding more cores. These cores individually run slower, so a dual core processor running at say 2.4MHz may have each core running at only 1.2MHz.

So if for 60% of the time tasks can be split, 40% of the time everything’s running at 1.2MHz. That’s slower than chips ran back in 2003!

Now Intel has six and eight-core processors on its roadmap. Imagine one of these new chips runs at 3.0Mhz and it has six cores. Each core may be rated at a snail-like 0.5MHz. So unless software gets smarter, real processing speed will actually be falling.

An uncomfortable and uneasy alliance

Of course, the chip manufacturers blamed the software writers, who passed the buck back to the chip guys. When they realised no one would win and knowing that lucrative hardware sales could be damaged by such unseemly battles, they decided hide the truth and look to other ways to speed things up.

So we now see stuff like more on-chip memory, caching and dedicated cores for certain functions. So things are not as bad as it seems – but your PC will never run anywhere near as fast as the chip giants would have you believe. The con continues.

Is anyone doing anything about this?

Don’t think that software writers haven’t tried to fix this. The problem isn’t new by any means and way back we were told that parallel processing was the future. Only it wasn’t.

So, instead of burning out their own brain cells trying to predict and then symmetrically split tasks, they’ve turned to throwing more functionality at the chips through wider channels or pipes into the chip, in the hope that they can find a use for all these cores.

What does this mean for you and me?

Unless you’re running a data centre, an avid games fan or graphics render artist, not a lot. You’ll see diminishing returns on future hardware purchases, but as processing moves into the Cloud, it’s the network that will have a far bigger impact on the way you work.

Keep swallowing the hype

But don’t think for one minute that this speed issue will stop the likes of Intel selling you the latest multi-core processor or the hardware manufacturers wrapping even more fancy tin around it.

Just don’t expect that hyper–speed system to be twice as fast as the one you’re replacing. because while they can get away with this con trick, it simply won’t.