Re: [9fans] threads vs forks

[John Barham <jbarham@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 4:54 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.

That seems to be what Knuth thinks.  Excerpt from a 2008 interview w/ InformIT:

"InformIT: Vendors of multicore processors have expressed frustration
at the difficulty of moving developers to this model. As a former
professor, what thoughts do you have on this transition and how to
make it happen? Is it a question of proper tools, such as better
native support for concurrency in languages, or of execution
frameworks? Or are there other solutions?

Knuth: I don’t want to duck your question entirely. I might as well
flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend
toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the
hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to
pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software
writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key
benchmarks! I won’t be surprised at all if the whole multithreading
idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Itanium" approach that
was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for
compilers were basically impossible to write."

Full interview is at http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856.