Multi-Core
Programming
FAST FORWARD
TOM
HALFHILLNext-Gen DRM
Sucks!
While proponents
behind the next-
gen optical for-
mats have been
busy dazzling con-
sumers with tantalizing
features and gigantic capacities
of up to 100GB per disc, they’re
also courting Hollywood with
promises of the most draconian
digital rights management (DRM)
technology ever implemented on
removable media.
Both of the upcoming next-
gen formats (Blu-ray and HD-DVD)
have adopted technology known
as the Advanced Access Content
System (AACS) as their primary
bulwark against piracy. AACS pre-
vents unauthorized duplication by
encrypting two keys—one on the
disc and another unique to each
hardware or software DVD play-
er—with 128-bit encryption. In
order to access a disc’s contents,
both keys must be decrypted.
This means that any broadcast or
reception point must have AACS
support, and network support
built into the standard suggests
that the technology might even
require an Internet connection.
Blu-ray is upping the ante
with an additional layer of “con-
tent management” called BD+,
and it’s nasty stuff. For example,
if a particular DVD is cracked to
allow unauthorized copying, the
BD+ system permits other discs
to carry a fi rmware payload that
will undo the crack. This is tanta-
mount to adding new encryption
to discs that have been decrypted.
And if an exploit is discovered in a
particular model of DVD player—
one that, for example, disables
region codes—commercial discs
could either refuse to play on that
player or disable the player itself,
rendering your hardware unus-
able until it’s serviced or repro-
grammed via a BD+ disc update.
How these technologies
will be implemented in PC opti-
cal drives is unclear, and as we
went to press the Blu-ray Disc
Association had not responded
to our inquiries.
Turner Broadcasting is entering the online-gam-
ing fray with a new service dubbed Gametap. For
just $15 a month you gain access to a huge cata-
log of games (300 at launch, with more to come)
including everything from Splinter Cell to Dig Dug
and more. It’s launching October 3. Take it for a
free two-week test drive at http://www.gametap.com.Old-and New-Skool
Games, On Tap
NOVEMBER 2005 MA XIMUMPC
Liquid-Metal-Cooled
Videocard
Is a No-Go
When we chatted with
Sapphire at E3 this May,
company reps were brimming with pride about
a new liquid-metal-cooled videocard, dubbed
Blizzard. We were told that the card works like
a standard liquid-cooling circuit, but instead of
water it uses a mixture of the elements gallium and
indium—two elements that when mixed in the right
proportion turn into a liquid that conducts heat 65
times better than water. The metal was pushed and
pulled through the circuit via magnets, eliminating
the need for a noisy pump. The new material was
so effi cient that Sapphire claimed production mod-
els wouldn’t even need fans (though the prototype,
shown above, has two). It sounded too good to be
true, and sadly, it was.
Several months after E3, Nanocoolers—the com-
pany responsible for building the liquid-metal cooling
device—pulled the plug on the project. According to
Stephen Kapusta, Sapphire’s PR director, Sapphire
was not happy about it. “They basically came in and
said liquid metal was too expensive,” said Kapusta.
He said that while the company isn’t averse to work-
ing with Nanocoolers in the future, next time it will
certainly wait until products are fi nalized before mak-
ing any announcements.Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine
and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report.E
ngineers have their own version of the
expression “passing the buck.” In the cube-
farm offices of Silicon Valley, it’s called
“throwing the problem over the wall.” That’s what
hardware engineers are doing with multi-core
processors. After running out of new ways to make
processors faster, they are slapping down multiple
processor cores on a single chip and daring the
software engineers to program the damn things.
Writing software code that runs efficiently in
parallel on multiple processors or multiple cores
looks hard, and often it’s even harder than it
looks. One problem is that many general-pur-
pose applications don’t easily break down into
multiple tasks. For instance, a word processor
can use one CPU to read keystrokes and dis-
play what you type, but unless you happen to
be printing another document simultaneously,
there’s not much else for a second (or third, or
fourth...) processor to do. In fact, the first CPU
spends so much time waiting between your
keystrokes that it can print something as a
background task without breaking a sweat.
Games offer more opportunities for parallel-
ism. However, today’s graphics processors already
offload most heavy lifting from the CPU. They do
the math for plotting 3D vertices, texture mapping,
shading, and so forth. At a recent engineering con-
ference, nVidia chief scientist David Kirk said that
multi-core CPUs sometimes can’t keep up with
his graphics processors. Worse, he’s seen some
games run slower on multi-core CPUs, because
the programmers didn’t understand how multiple
cores interact with the caches.
Operating systems must get smarter, too.
Ideally, they should be able to distribute workloads
across multiple processors or cores, even if the
individual programs contain little or no parallel
code. Modern PCs always have several programs
running or idling in the background. (To view the
list, press Ctrl-Alt-Del and click the Task Manager’s
Processes tab.) Unfortunately, load balancing isn’t
easy. It will be years before operating systems
catch up with the multi-core trend.
Maybe it’s karma. For decades, hardware
engineers designed faster microprocessors while
too many software engineers got lazy and hid
their sloppy programming behind the blessings of
Moore’s law. Now the programmers aren’t getting
a free ride any more.