Amdahl's Law in the Multicore Era

that was the most insightful explanation of amdahls law ive seen. I would like to know what progress has been made since the talk?

Shouldn't the theoretical speed up be 100 times if parallelism is at 99%?

I hope you're not actually referring to nature as the real oppressor.

hahah this is awesme my family creadted this law!!

a core isn't like a neuron though... it is closer to a cortex subsystem in the brain and as such, the 74 year estimate by fmsf303 is probably a few decades out due to this many orders of magnitude error...

@marcusklaas A neuron does much more than a transitor. It averages over a series of inputs and fires if it is above some treshhold. You'd need about a million transistors to replace one neuron. Digital transistors is massive overkill, it should be possible to build much simpler analog electronics that does the job well enough with far fewer components. Synapses form on an adhoc basis, this ought to be very hard to simulate compared to some static configuration of neurons and their synapses.

@fmsf303 You're way overestimating the capability of the brain if you think 2^37 cores are necessary. A neuron in the human brain is capable of firing once every ~5 ms; a "clock frequency" if you will of about 200 Hz. A dedicated ASIC simulating a neuron would require only about a million transistors; it wouldn't be pipelined as a modern CPU and so operate at 100 MHz instead. That's just a factor ~1000 more transistors than a modern CPU core for the same computational power as the brain.

(PS. to my below message on the challenges of architecture evolution and the current OS monopoly) The future of the OS market may crack open with luck. The world's future OS belongs to the best parallelization code writers on the planet. YOU guys can kick MS tail. Monopoly my a**. Cheers to the future.

FASCINATING. What a clearly presented lecture. Covers basics and extrapolates. It is time for the Wintel monopoly to be broken up. PERIOD. Microsoft should open up its OS for SUN Niagara or SPARC multicore chips. Intel should focus on a clean break and make improvemed processors. Instead we have Microshaft's approach to multicore parallelism (how to increase "F" in the lecture) : we have a cool aero glassy interface. the graphic part of the OS can run on another core. Thank you Microshaft.

Yes, I agree with you that the capitalist system enslaves us. It is quite obvious how it is a protectionist racket of cronyism. With all bail-outs to the politicians friends. But we must also be careful to not confuse the true solidarity that exists amongst people doing business with each other on a voluntary basis which could be even more altruistic if only government didn't threaten and mug us people that is trying to do peaceful exchange.

I don't think we are slaves to biology or physics because we are both biological and physical beings. I think having an economic system and "joining forces" is great but what I'm saying is that our particular capitalist system enslaves us in many ways. Using this talk as an example, it is obvious how the economic system solicits "new and exciting" new software which is really only more bloated because there is a need to sell. Then we have to create more advanced hardware.

this conversation makes it obvious as to how we are slaves to the economic system we have established.