I snipped it all, although I can't believe that someone educated in
computers would be ignorant of both watson's and olson's remarks along
with Gary Killdall flying and gates' 640k.
I was just out at sam's club the other day, and they were selling, for
550 bucks retail or the cost of a nice middle of the road TV, a Compaq
AMD system with a 17 inch flat CRT monitor (not lcd), 512MB, 180 GB
disk (might have been 250, don't remember for sure), XP, about 8 USB
ports, sound, etc etc. Even a little reader for the memory cards out of
cameras right on the front.
Computers already are into the realm of home electronics.
You mean the work required to tune? People will optimize the hell out
of compute intensive code--to a point. The work required to get the
world-beating SpecFP numbers is probably beyond that point.
If alpha and pa-risc hadn't been killed off, I might agree with you
about Itanium. No one is going to abandon the high-end to an IBM
monopoly. Never happen (again).
I gather that Future Systems eventually became AS/400.
We'll never know
what might have become of Itanium if it hadn't been such a committee
enterprise. The 8080, after all, was not a particularly superior
processor design, and nobody needed *it*, either.
I'm definitely not alone in the woods on this one, Keith.
Go look at Dally's papers on Brook and Stream. Take a minute and visit gpgpu.org.
I could dump you dozens of papers of people doing stuff other than
graphics on stream processors, and they are doing a helluva lot of
graphics, easily found with google, gpgpu, or by checking out siggraph
conferences. Network processors are just another version of the same
story. Network processors are right at the soul of mainstream
computing, and they're going to move right onto the die.
With everything having turned into point-to-point links, computers have
turned into packet processors already. Current processing is the
equivalent of loading a container ship by hand-loading everything into
containers, loading them onto the container ship, and hand-unloading at
the other end. Only a matter of time before people figure out how to
leave things in the container for more of the trip, as the world already
does with physical cargo.
Power consumption matters. That's one point about BlueGene I've
conceded repeatedly and loudly.
Stream processors have the disadvantage that it's a wildly different
computing paradigm. I'd be worried if *I* had to propose and work
through the new ways of coding. Fortunately, I don't. It's happening.
The harder question is *why* any of this is going to happen. A lower
power data center would be a very big deal, but nobody's going to do a
project like that from scratch. PC's are already plenty powerful
enough, or so the truism goes. I don't believe it, but somebody has to
come up with the killer app, and Sony apparently thinks they have it.
We'll see.
On the face of it, MS word doesn't seem like it should work because of a
huge number of unpredictable code paths. Turns out that even a word
processing program is fairly repetitive. Do you know if they included
exception and recovery in the analysis?
It's still worth understanding why. The only way to make things go
faster, beyond a certain point, is to make them predictable.
Take Keith down? Wouldn't dream of it. Rather take my old coon dog
and go out hunting bear.
Of course. Anyone can write a compiler that works. Writing a compiler
that makes use of static parallelism in normal codes (what Intel promised)
is quite another thing.
The good folks on comp.arch were laughing at the
attempt. ...yes, at the time. It had been tried too many times to assume
that Intel was going to crack the difficult nut that no one before had
come close to.
...and you think they're about to jump into Itanic (Intel's proprietary
boat) with both feet? Look in your never-mirror again.
Revisionism at its best. Yes, FS and AS/400 were/are both single-level
store machines. Yes, some of the FS architects were sent to siberia to
find a niche. ;-) Saying that FS became AS/400 is a little bit of a
stretch. Accpeting even that, AS/400 (really S/38) was in a new market.
Their customers didn't have the $kaBillions invested in software that was
the death of FS. The S/38 (and AS/400) were allowed to eat at the carcas
of DEC. ...not at the S/360 customers, who had *no* interest in it.
*THAT* is the lesson Intel hasn't learned. Their customers don't *want*
Itanic. They want x86. If Intel grew x86 into the server space, maybe.
As it is AMD is draging it (and Intel) kicking-and-screaming there.
Cray has not much of anything to do with anything at this point.Not alone, but without the money to make your dreams real. I follow the
money. Were you right, Cray wouldn't need the US government's support.
The fundamentals in favor of streaming computation in terms of powerPlease. A few academic papers are making anyone (other than their
authors) any money? NPs are a special case. Show me an NP with a DP
FPU. Show me one that's making money.
Who ever said I didn't like Cell? It doesn't do standard floating...and you still don't like Cell? I thought you'd be creaming your jeans
over it.
Power consumption isn't something discussed in polite conversation. ;-)
Don't know where you think the apparent contradiction is. An argumentIt is indeed a huge thing. Expect to see some strange things come out of
this dilemma.
It's *not* like this is new. It's been done, yet for some reason not
enough want it to pay the freight. If it happens, fine. That only means
that someone has figured out that it's good for something. Meanwhile...
Didn't you just contradict yourself? ...in one paragraph?
By "static parallelism" I think you mean compile-time scheduling to
exploit parallelism.
I think I've said this before, and maybe even to this exact point: If
you think a problem can be done, and there is no plausible
demonstration that it can't be done (e.g. the computational complexity
of the game "go"), then it is an unsolved problem, not an impossible
problem.
How to handicap levels of implausibility? Compared to what is actually
accomplished in silicon, building the required compiler seems like a
plausible bet.
We all have our hobby horses: yours is latency, mine is predictability
(and whatever bandwidth is necessary to exploit it). Understanding and
exploiting predictability is ultimately a bigger win than any other
possible advance in computation that I know of.
A poster to comp.arch
suggested, not entirely seriously, that working around the latency of a
cluster shouldn't be any harder than working around the memory wall and
that we should be using the same kinds of strategies (OoO, prefetch,
cache, speculative computatio). Whether he intended his remark to be
taken seriously or not, we will eventually need that level of
sophistication, and it all comes down to the same thing: understanding
the predictability of a computation well enough to be able to reach far
enough into the future to beat latency.
Yes, I just made the problem even harder. Until there is a
demonstration that it can't be done, it is an unsolved problem, not an
impossible problem.
The business prospects of Intel in the meantime? I think they're mean
enough to survive.
Power is not proprietary? Only one company builds boxes with Power.
Many will build boxes with itanium.
Intel is certainly not happy about the success of Opteron.
Cray has not much of anything to do with anything at this point. Another
national lab poodle. And I think you just moved the goalposts.
The fundamentals in favor of streaming computation in terms of power
consumption are just overwhelming, and they become more so as scale
sizes shrink.
Who ever said I didn't like Cell? It doesn't do standard floating point
arithmetic and it isn't really designed for double precision floating
point arithmetic, but Cell or a Cell derivative could revolutionize
computation.
I see it discussed more and more. Blades have become more powerful and
they've become less unreasonable in price, but the resulting power
density creates a different problem for data centers.
Don't know where you think the apparent contradiction is.
An argument
could be made that VisiCalc made the PC. Whether that's exactly true or
not, VisiCalc made the usefulness of a PC as anything but a very
expensive typewriter immediately obvious.
I'm betting that the applications for streaming computation will come.
Whether it is Sony and Cell that make the breakthrough and that it is
imminent is less clear than that the breakthrough will come.
I can't think of something appropriately compact and eloquent to sayAt this point? They *got* to this point by playing a role in your dreams.
I haven't moved *anything*. You love Crayish architectures. I love
busiesses that make sense. Computers are no longer a toy for me.
They're a means to an end. I really don't care what architecture wins.
We really don't know at this point. There was a long thread onLet me repeat; "you keep saying this", but if the problems can't be solved
by streaming they don't save any power at all. The universe of problems
that are solvable by streaming is on the order of the size of
"embarrasingly parallel" problems that can be solved with an array of a
kabillion 8051s.
I though you were one of the nay--sayers, like Felger. ;-)
Note the smiley. I'd really like to go here, but I don't know where the
confidentiality edge is, so... Let me just say that you aren't the
only one noticing these things.
How much? What areas of computing?