Skyscraper wrote:As you might or should suspect I'm fully aware of this but when the development is primarily focused on the server market and efficient CPUs for laptops
This very statement tells me you didn't get my point at all.
I repeat 'mainstream is just a price tag'.
CPU development is CPU development. The days of separate CPU architectures for different market segments are long behind us.
Intel and AMD use the same basic architectures for all market segments... mobile, desktop and server/workstation.
So by default the technology that they develop for one market segment, can and will also be used for others. So the only 'focus' they have, is that they develop a single x86 architecture. In many cases, a Xeon or Opteron is little more than a rebadged desktop or mobile CPU.
Skyscraper wrote:I know of the problems with coding multithreaded but it IS the future, the sooner we start finding ways to work around these issues the better.
This is utter nonsense, with all due respect.
I keep hearing this from people who have no idea about (multithreaded) software development.
Firstly, it's not like if you optimize code for multiple threads, that you pick a specific amount of threads. You redesign your code to use a parallel algorithm, and this algorithm can be scaled up to any number of threads.
Secondly, just because the mainstream doesn't own anything with more than 4 threads (which isn't even true, since the Core i7 is a very popular option, and it offers 8 threads), doesn't mean you should stop there as a developer. Just like game developers generally develop their games for future/extreme high-end GPUs, with the latest technology (eg, Crysis being released only shortly after Vista/DX10 and the first wave of DX10-capable hardware), they can and will do the same with multithreaded CPUs. They can just get a Xeon with 22 cores and see how their code scales to that.
They don't need to wait for these CPUs to become mainstream.
Aside from that, come on, how long are people going to continue the 'the multithreading era is about to begin' nonsense? Multi-core CPUs have been mainstream for well over a decade now. And before that, multithreading/multi-CPU has been studied for decades on mainframes and supercomputers. It's hardly a new area of software development. We've been in the multithreading era for ages. This is what you get. See Amdahl's Law.