Digital Home Thoughts: More CPU Cores Not Always Better Says Sandia

"The Sandia team has found that simply increasing the number of cores in a processor doesn't always improve performance, and at a point the performance actually decreases. Sandia simulations have shown that moving from dual core to four core processors offers a significant increase in performance. However, the team has found that moving from four cores to eight cores offers an insignificant performance gain. When you move from eight cores to 16 cores, the performance actually drops. Sandia team members used simulations with algorithms for deriving knowledge form large data sets for their tests. The team found that when you moved to 16 cores the performance of the system was barely as good as the performance seen with dual-cores."

First we hit the thermal/power barrier on CPUs, which had Intel and AMD moving toward a multi-core approach rather than simply racheting up the speed, and now we see that moving beyond four cores is problematic - I wonder how they'll get around that problem? Granted, the real problem with multi-core computing is still more software than hardware.