A guru speaks on multicore programming
About 2 ½ years ago I wrote a fairly pessimistic post about the utility of multicore chips. I read this morning in the July issue of IEEE Spectrum an article by David Patterson a famed computer researcher at UC Berkeley on the same subject. His conclusions are approximately the same as mine, but he states them more eloquently, in greater detail, and with far more credibility. He also offers some predictions, and a few rays of hope.
Patterson’s article was available online here. I recommend it.
About 2 ½ years ago I wrote a fairly pessimistic post about the utility of multicore chips. It’s here. I read this morning in the July issue of IEEE Spectrum an article by David Patterson, a famed computer researcher at UC Berkeley, on the same subject. His conclusions are approximately the same as mine, but he states them more eloquently, in greater detail, and with far more credibility. He also offers some predictions, and a few rays of hope.
Patterson’s article is available online here. I recommend it.
is photoshop an application that can exploit parallelism? my outdated system chugs along at a snail’s pace. i’ve been contemplating building a high end system down the road and am seduced by the high end multicore chips. specifically with the intel core chips, where’s the point of diminishing return?
Photoshop does OK when implementing filters, and not so well otherwise. Lightroom is very good at multicore usage, often pinning the CPU meter on my four-core system, something hardly any other program does.
For many people, the biggest improvement they can make in Photoshop speed is to have enough memory so that neither the app or the OS swaps data to the disk. You want everything in RAM. If you don’t have enough RAM, you’re wasting your money getting a faster CPU.
I had to go to 16GB of RAM to get enough main memory for Photoshop and Lightroom to play together with the size image that I use, which are often 1GB files.
Jim
i’m already over 2GB on some of my more complex files. should i be looking at 24GB RAM if i want to bring up multiple applications? and will a 10-bit graphics card also put additional strain on the system?
this also brings up another question – should i go to SSDs on both the primary and scratch disk to help alleviate some of the bottleneck?
If you’ve got enough memory, the SSD will only speed up loading the app and reading and writing files. Since SSDs are small and pricey, you’ll have to swap your images on to the SSD, work with them, and swap them off. That’s not a timesaver in my workflow. I would suggest making the SSD your primary disk. That way you’ll have faster boots as well as faster app loading.
Yes, I would think that you’d want 24 or 32 GB of RAM.
I’m not sure about what you mean by a 10-bit graphics card? Do you mean 10 bits per pixel per color? Some people would call that a 30-bit card. I wouldn’t worry about its effect on speed; updating the display is a small part of the Photoshop CPU budget.
Jim
i meant 30-bit card.
btw, i noticed your server is still on daylight savings time.
Thanks for the info about the server. It should be fixed now.
Jim
what about the notion of beefing up the RAM on the graphics card rather than on the motherboard? would racheting up to a 2GB graphics card negate the need to go beyond 16GB RAM?
RAM on a graphics card is not fungible with RAM in the main store. In fact, it could work against you if the app is programmed to keep a shadow image of what’s on the graphics card in main memory.
You don’t need a lot of graphics card memory to run Photoshop.
If you want high performance, you do need enough main memory so that neither Photoshop nor the OS has to use the disk for swapping when presented with your workload.
Jim
thanks! that’s an eye opener.