On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 5:54 PM, J.R. Mauro <jrm8005@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 7:54 PM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
> wrote:
> >> I should have qualified. I mean *massive* parallelization when applied
> >> to "average" use cases. I don't think it's totally unusable (I
> >> complain about synchronous I/O on my phone every day), but it's being
> >> pushed as a panacea, and that is what I think is wrong. Don Knuth
> >> holds this opinion, but I think he's mostly alone on that,
> >> unfortunately.
> >
> > it's interesting that parallel wasn't cool when chips were getting
> > noticably faster rapidly.  perhaps the focus on parallelization
> > is a sign there aren't any other ideas.
>
> Indeed, I think it is. The big manufacturers seem to have hit a wall
> with clock speed, done a full reverse, and are now just trying to pack
> more transistors and cores on the chip. Not that this is evil, but I
> think this is just as bad as the obsession with upping the clock
> speeds in that they're too focused on one path instead of
> incorporating other cool ideas (i.e., things Transmeta was working on
> with virtualization and hosting foreign ISAs)


Can we bring back the Burroughs? :-)


>
>
> >
> > - erik
> >
> >
>
>