Parallel PowerPoint: Why the Power Law is Important

The notion of "parallel PowerPoint" is a poster child for the uselessness of multicore on client computers. Rendering a slide two, four, eight times faster is a joke. Nobody needs it.

Running PowerPoint 4, 16, 64 times longer on my laptop battery, though, that's useful. I am purely sick of carrying around a 3 lb. power supply with my expensively light, carbide case, 3 lb. laptop.

This is why the Parallel Power Law – if the hardware is designed right, the processor power can drop with the square of the number of processors – is important. I'd like to suggest that it is a, possibly the, killer app for parallelism.

There are two keys here, the source of both I discussed in the previous post, the Parallel Power Law. One key is reduced power, of course: Double the processors and halve the clock rate, with associated reduced voltage, and the power drops by 4X (see that post). That decrease doesn't happen, though, unless the other key is present: You don't increase performance, as parallel mavens have been attempting for eons; instead, you keep it constant. Many systems, particularly laptops and graphics units, now reduce clock speed under heat or power constraints; but they don't maintain performance.

The issue is this: All the important everyday programs out there run with perfectly adequate performance today, and have done so for nigh unto a decade. Email, browsers, spreadsheets, word processors, and yes, PowerPoint, all those simply don't have a performance issue; they're fast enough now. Multicore in those systems is a pure waste: It's not needed, and they don't use it. Yes, multiple cores get exercised by the multitasking transparently provided by operating systems, but it really doesn't do anything useful; with a few exceptions, primarily games, programs are nearly always performance-gated by disk or network or other functions than by processing speed. One can point to exceptions – spreadsheets in financial circles where you press F5 (recalculate) and go get coffee, or lunch, or a night's sleep – but they scarcely are used in volume.

And volume is what defines a killer app: It must be something used widely enough to soak up the output of fabs. Client applications are the only ones with that characteristic.

What I'm trying to point to here appears to be a new paradigm for the use of parallelism: Use it not to achieve more performance, but to drastically lower power consumption without reducing performance. It applies to both traditional clients, and to the entire new class of mobile apps running on smart phones / iPads / iGoggles that is now the fastest-expanding frontier.

For sure, the pure quadratic gains (or more; see the comments on that post) won't be realized, because there are many other uses of power this does not affect, like displays, memory, disks, etc. But a substantial fraction of the power used is still in the processor, so dropping its contribution by a lot will certainly help.

Can this become a new killer-app bandwagon? It's physically possible. But I doubt it, because the people with the expertise to do it, the parallel establishment, is too heavily invested in the paradigm of parallel for higher performance, busily working out how to get to exascale computation, with conjoined petascale department systems, etc.

Some areas definitely need that level of computation; weather and climate simulation, for example. But cases like that, while useful and even laudable, are increasingly remote from the volumes needed to keep the industry running as it has in the past. Parallelism for lower power is the only case I've seen that truly addresses that necessarily broad market.