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During a private briefing with Intel at IDF yesterday to talk about Nehalem, we were given a demo of some cool software in development that makes good use of the multi-threaded cores of the new CPU. Francois Piednoel, the Senior Performance Analyst (ie. benchmarking guru) at Intel describes Deep Viewer as a "science project" of sorts. It's an image sorting application that they acquired from an independent software developer that reminds us of Microsoft Live Labs' Seadragon technology (which is used in the recently released Photosynth online app). We're talking about near-infinite scaling of visual data (in this case photos and videos) being processed in real-time on your display.
In the first part of the demo, we were introduced to a Core i7-powered system running in tri-channel memory mode with a fancy-looking 30" display. The monitor was actually a touchscreen (enabled by that exposed silicon around the bezel) and one of the things Francois did first was move some objects around with his finger.
When it started up, the Deep Viewer app showed a small calendar grid next to a world map. Pinching the calendar -- like gesturing on an iPhone -- expanded the frame. And as the grid grew, we could see images populating the space within each calendar day. Francois kept zooming in, and more images revealed themselves on the fly.
This was actually 200GB worth of images, stored off of a 500GB hard drive. Over 224 terapixels of data was accessible in this demo, being streamed into view and processed in real-time. The scaling was incredibly fast, and we were told the app didn't store any cache or pre-process files. The images that popped up to full resolution as we zoomed in weren't just jpegs, either. RAW photos, bitmaps, and other image formats all work with Deep Viewer -- legacy file and codec support is one of the reasons a general-purpose CPU is optimal for this kind of app.
In addition to images, many of the thumbnails were actually videos, too! 640x480 (non-HD) clips shot with a power-and-shoot camera were split up into indexed scenes and played alongside the high-res jpegs. One really cool feature is the app's ability to run facial recognition algorithms on videos when you zoom in on them. We focused on a scene of some passengers walking off of a train, and a red circle highlighted each face to pick up details and find matches in other photos in the database.
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gatorXXX
August 21, 2008 at 4:31pm
I agree with you......those were the key words they said.....an intel app designed and made by intel for intel and a benchmarking guru hired by intel for intel. MMMMMM makes me wonder how many other apps are favored by intel....does 3dmark06 come to mind? Does for me.
jwalch.hawk
August 21, 2008 at 5:15pm
AMD's just as guilty of making multicore chips as Intel is. It's not like they saw Intel make core jumps and just sat there going "Nah, we'll stick with single core, no reason for more." Hell, wasn't AMD first on the multi-core scene (I know IMB's Power4 was actually first, but since it's not x86 I'm ignoring it for this case)? I'm pretty sure they were first to dual-core on 64-bit, though I'm less certain about who was first in general (I'm assuming the first were 32-bit). Anyway, the point is that AMD would love applications like this just as much as Intel does. The only difference I'm really seeing here is that AMD didn't actually develop an app to rationalize their decisions.
Personally, I'm glad Intel is doing this. Yes, it's a gimmicky little "this is what you can achieve with multi-core" thing, at least in terms of motivation. But if people see it and *do* demand more apps like it, then you can damn well bet developers will change their tune. Fact is, developers don't like multi-core because it's far easier (at least right now) to code for a single core and consumers haven't demonstrated to them that they want or need anything that requires more than a core of processing power. Ergo, multi-core development/programming is unnecessarily difficult. This might just be an instance of consumers having ready access to way more processing power than they really need for the things they currently want to do (dunno, just reaching on that one - though I think the rapid popularity of these weak [comparably speaking] netbooks serves to verify that point). Let's remember that it was years before an OS as a GUI (a thing we take for granted today) really took hold. I mean, after all, why would anyone want or need anything more than a command line? :D Just because developers in general don't think multi-core is worth it doesn't mean they're right. They might be, but let's remember they're just as biased as the chipmakers are - just in the opposite direction.
horzo
August 21, 2008 at 2:56pm
" Intel's argument is that this is the kind of application that users should be demanding from software developers..."
...so we can justify our decision to push higher and higher core counts and sell more chips.
Software developers have, not surprisingly, found better things to do with their time than concentrate on the complexities of multithreaded software design. Consumers for the most part don't know the difference, and certainly aren't out there demanding multihtreaded apps.
