Re: [whatwg] Proposal: navigator.cores

On Mon, May 05, 2014 at 01:05:35PM -0700, Rik Cabanier wrote:
> On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 11:10 AM, David Young <dyoung@pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, May 03, 2014 at 10:49:00AM -0700, Adam Barth wrote:
> > > Over on blink-dev, we've been discussing [1] adding a property to
> > navigator
> > > that reports the number of cores [2].  As far as I can tell, this
> > > functionality exists in every other platform (including iOS and Android).
> > >  Some of the use cases for this feature have been discussed previously on
> > > this mailing list [3] and rejected in favor of a more complex system,
> > > perhaps similar to Grand Central Dispatch [4].  Others have raised
> > concerns
> > > that exposing the number of cores could lead to increased fidelity of
> > > fingerprinting [5].
> >
> > navigator.cores seems to invite developers to try to write web apps
> > that make local decisions about the scheduling of work on cores when
> > they're missing important essential knowledge about the global context:
> > cores may not be equally fast, energy-efficient, or available;
> 
> Eli already pointed out that this is not a problem. Heterogeneous systems
> still allow concurrency on the different cores; the faster ones will simply
> finish their work faster

It's not so simple.  It depends on what the work is, how and when you
divide up the work, and the overhead of enlisting additional threads to
do the work.

Dave

-- 
David Young
dyoung@pobox.com    Urbana, IL    (217) 721-9981

Received on Tuesday, 6 May 2014 14:46:36 UTC