Re: [9fans] Barrelfish

[Sam Watkins <sam@nipl.net>]

> > There is a vast range of applications that cannot
> > be managed in real time using existing single-core technology.
>
> please name one.

Your apparent lack of imagination surprises me.

Surely you can see that a whole range of applications becomes possible when
using a massively parallel system, when compared to a single-CPU system.  You
could perhaps also achieve these applications using a large network of 1000
normal computers, but that would be expensive and use a lot of space.

I named two in another post: real-time animated raytracing, and instantaneous
complex dsp over a long audio track.  I'll also mention instantaneous video
encoding.  Instantaneous building of a complex project from source.
(I'm defining instantaneous as less than 1 second for this.)

There are also qualitatively different applications, such as effective
computer vision, which can be achieved with parallel systems.  The operation of
animal eyes and brains is obviously massively parallel.

A 6502 cpu could achieve a lot in its day with 4000 transistors at 2Mhz.
A pentium 4 has 125 million transistors.  So, with modern IC tech and excluding
the necessary networking and RAM etc on the chip, one could put 31000 6502
processors on a single chip using pentium 4 integration technology, and I
suppose you could also clock it up to perhaps 1 Ghz.

I shouldn't have to explain how powerful something like this could be.  31000
8-bit 6502 processors running at 1Ghz, fully utilized, could achieve over 7
trillion 32-bit integer operations per second.  That is over 7000 times more
powerful than a pentium 4 having the same number of transistors.

We have 31000 times denser ICs today, and at least 500 times higher clock
speeds, but I do not see a 15.5 million times improvement in computer
performance when comparing a 6502 to a pentium 4!  That is because pentium 4 is
a great hulking piece of crap and a waste of transistors.

I could easily think of another hundred applications for parallel systems, but
I'm sure that if you're intelligent enough to understand what I am saying you
can think of your own examples.

Sam