Multicore RAW Processing-The Shape Of Things To Come

Question

For what it's worth, here is a link to the Bibble forum with a presentation of Bibble 5 Pro on a 16 core AMD Opteron test bed running Windows Server 2008:
http://support.bibblelabs.com/webboard/viewtopic.php?t=10962
(I tried to post this on the Beta 2 forum first, but it keeps asking me for a new "nickname" when I try to post or login and won't accept any I try to enter).

Answer 1

>But why? I can't understand.
That's because you forget that we're talking about say 8 threads, each working on their own RAW image, so they read in a RAW (say 12 MB compressed) and have to write a jpeg result (say 4 MB). Now multiply that by 4 or 8 (letalone 16), and you see that you very easily go over the 20 MB/s of a laptop drive or 50 MB/s typical when doing reads and writes simultaneously of a good desktop drive. So you will need fast RAID arrays to keep up with a multiprocessor machine.
>Bibble says Bibble 5 was not disk bound in the test. They also say that the test scales "linearly"
That means they designed it correctly and must have used a fast RAID disk. And indeed they used RAID 0 (bad idea for data security BTW) according to the linked thread. For us mere mortals with normal 7200 or 10k rpm disks, we would not be able to supply the data to keep a 16 core machine busy. I bet that with 7200 rpm disks and a 4 core machine you could already run into I/O issues if you're exporting to tiff.