Re: [9fans] Barrelfish

[Roman Shaposhnik <roman@shaposhnik.org>]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 5:21 PM, Sam Watkins <sam@nipl.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 04:21:16PM +0100, roger peppe wrote:
>> BTW it seems the gates quote is false:
>>
>> http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
>
> maybe the Ken quote is false too - hard to believe he's that out of touch

I think the reverse is true -- the fact that he was asking these questions
(and again -- he was asking them wrt. garden variety way of doing multicore
with a special emphasis on *desktops*) makes him very much in touch
with reality, unlike most folks who think that once they get 65535 core they
would run 65535 times faster.

The  misinterpretation of Moore's Law is to blame here, of course: Moore
is a smart guy and he was talking about transistor density, but pop culture
made is sound like he was talking speed up. For some time the two were
in lock-step. Not anymore.

I would appreciate if the folks who were in the room correct me, but if I'm
not mistaken Ken was alluding to some FPGA work/ideas that he had done
and my interpretation of his comments was that if we *really* want to
make things parallel we have to bite the bullet, ditch multicore and rethink
our strategy.

Thanks,
Roman.