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Asked: 2026-05-10T20:27:37+00:00

From the .net 4.0 previews I have read until now there has been lots

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From the .net 4.0 previews I have read until now there has been lots of talk on how the next .net version will handle and use cpus with multiple cores. We will have additions like plinq that will help us make use of multiple cores. My question is why should I have to bother my mind with handling multiple cores when all I want is to make my application run faster. Why can’t there be a kind of virtual cpu layer that exposes all cores as 1 core to my application?

Edit: I would like to rephrase my question to avoid misunderstanding, Could there be made a software that would expose a virtual thread to my application that would be 10 times faster because underlaying it was using 10 cores. I do not want to have different threads doing things in paralell, I just want my one thread running faster. I guess this is not a big problem today but soon we’ll have 80 core processors to play with and then I would feel a bit shorthanded only using 1 of them.

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  1. Because parallelisation just can’t be done without the aid of a human.

    There’s a certain amount which can be done – and already is done within a single core. Microparallelism is a lot easier than ‘analyse this whole program and make it run in parallel’ for obvious reasons. In general, many of the difficult decisions which have to be made when writing a parallel program depend on what you want the program to do, and how it should behave under various conditions.

    It’s possible that more will be able to be parallelised automatically over time, but I’m happy with the advance of making it significantly easier to do manually for the moment.

    EDIT: Having seen the edit in your question, there’s no way of making it go faster. There’s a really easy physical metaphor for this: a pregnancy takes 9 months. If you have 9 pregnant women, you can end up with 9 babies after 9 months, but you can’t make 9 women have 1 baby in 1 month. It just doesn’t work like that. Not all problems are parallelisable. (Fred Brooks: “The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.” (The Mythical Man Month, p. 17))

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