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)

>
> - erik
>
>