Comment by clavigne
7 hours ago
> However, when an entire program consists of a single chain of dependent instructions, which may happen e.g. when computing certain kinds of hash functions over a file, you are doomed. There is no way to increase the performance of that program.
Even in that case, you would probably benefit from having many cores because the user is probably running other things on the same machine, or the program is running on a runtime with eg garbage collector threads etc. I’d venture it’s quite rare that the entire machine is waiting on a single sequential task!
> I’d venture it’s quite rare that the entire machine is waiting on a single sequential task!
But that happens all the time in video game code.
Video games may have many threads running, but there's usually a single-thread bottleneck. To the point that P-cores and massively huge Zen5 cores are so much better for video games.
Javascript (ie: rendering webpages) is single-threaded bound, which is probably why the Phone makers have focused so much on making bigger cores as well. Yes, there's plenty of opportunities for parallelism in web browsers and webpages. But most of the work is in the main Javascript thread called at the root.