Re: [9fans] threads vs forks

[blstuart@bellsouth.net]

> 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.

Gotta do something will all the extra transistors.  After all, Moore's
law hasn't been repealed.  And pipelines and traditional caches
are pretty good examples of dimishing returns.  So multiple cores
seems a pretty straightforward approach.

Now there is another use that would at least be intellectually interesting
and possible useful in practice.  Use the transistors for a really big
memory running at cache speed.  But instead of it being a hardware
cache, manage it explicitly.  In effect, we have a very high speed
main memory, and the traditional main memory is backing store.
It'd give a use for all those paging algorithms that aren't particularly
justified at the main memory-disk boundary any more.  And you
can fit a lot of Plan 9 executable images in a 64MB on-chip memory
space.  Obviously, it wouldn't be a good fit for severely memory-hungry
apps, and it might be a dead end overall, but it'd at least be something
different...

BLS