LOLMulticore

April 27, 2009 6:30 PM

OMG, Multi-Threading is Easier Than Networking [pdf, white paper about the multi-core future from Intel(R)]
posted by Monday, stony Monday (22 comments total)

Fuckin' Content-Disposition: attachment. If I wanted to save your PDF to disk I would have held down the option key.
posted by ryanrs at 6:39 PM on April 27 [10 favorites has favorites]

The threading to networking analogy is a good one, though I don't buy that one is easier than the other. Also, too many cats.
posted by b1tr0t at 6:56 PM on April 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

For anyone who didn't follow the link, Orion Granatir from Insomniac Games offered a RouterGod-inspired whitepaper, which featured the aforementioned kitties making a conversational reference to the Catan games.

It's more layman-friendly than Ars Technica's breakdown of multithreading basics, though Granatir's occasional asides were almost reminiscent of David James Clarke's attempt to make the Netware 5 reference into something hip.
posted by Smart Dalek at 7:06 PM on April 27 [3 favorites has favorites]

Orion Granatir from Insomniac Games

Formerly of Insomniac Games, now at Intel.
posted by dammitjim at 7:12 PM on April 27

Well, that was obnoxious, but correct, if you really need a elementary introduction to threading.
posted by Super Hans at 7:14 PM on April 27

Concurring with Super Hans: this is just a marketing puff piece. It's just "Intro to Threading" that you could find on tens or hundreds of web sites packaged as a white paper. It does not appear to have anything to do with multiple cores or future hardware developments.
posted by XMLicious at 7:23 PM on April 27

Not sure who the target audience for that is. "I've optimized my single-threaded computationally-bottlenecked C application as much as I can, so I guess I should multithread it. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about multithreading, and am only able to digest new information in LOLcat form."
posted by blenderfish at 7:27 PM on April 27 [2 favorites has favorites]

The target audience is Orion Granatir's new boss, who has been scratching his head for the last week trying to figure out why the new guy got such a big signing bonus.
posted by b1tr0t at 7:32 PM on April 27 [2 favorites has favorites]

I liked the kitties
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 7:47 PM on April 27

A more interesting threading product from Intel is their Threading Building Blocks library, also available in an open-source friendly version.
posted by jedicus at 7:48 PM on April 27

'Orion Granatir' sounds like a character name from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That is in no way a bad thing.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:48 PM on April 27 [3 favorites has favorites]

The people who would find this useful already know this. The people that don't know what a semaphore is probably won't understand it with the half-assed explanation.

This paper is clearly written by and for poseurs — trying to get in on the geek cool. Get off my lawn.
posted by amuseDetachment at 8:26 PM on April 27

Wouldn't Two Girls One Cup would have been more appropriate for a metaphor for resource starvation?
posted by sien at 8:57 PM on April 27

Yeah, but then you'd have to bring goatse in to explain the MHz wars.
posted by b1tr0t at 8:59 PM on April 27

Is it wrong for me to enjoy multithreaded programming? It can grow into such an insufferably complicated problem that it just taunts me to find an elegant solution.
posted by spiderskull at 9:53 PM on April 27

I don't know how those people got their cats wedged into their whitepapers, or why.
posted by loquacious at 11:42 PM on April 27

But threading will make us like slashdot!
posted by klangklangston at 11:52 PM on April 27 [3 favorites has favorites]

See also: Actors
posted by godisdad at 12:05 AM on April 28

The comments here promised me a LOLcats version of a threading tutorial, which sounded funny.

I was lied to.
posted by DU at 4:47 AM on April 28

I CAN HAS MUTEX?
posted by blenderfish at 11:04 AM on April 28

Not that I really need to, but will this help me write multi-threaded applications in C#/ASP.NET? Cuz we don't do any C/C++ around here.
posted by exhilaration at 11:15 AM on April 28

Not that I really need to, but will this help me write multi-threaded applications in C#/ASP.NET? Cuz we don't do any C/C++ around here.

Concepts are all the same. C# exposes a lot of synchronization primitives, including the standard kernel level waithandles, semaphores etc.

but monitor is frequently a better choice because it doesn't involve a user/kernel mode transition
posted by flaterik at 12:06 PM on April 28