Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

[Lawrence Stewart <stewart@serissa.com>]

> On 2018, Jun 28, at 3:42 PM, Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 28 Jun 2018 07:56:09 -0700 Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>> Huge numbers of wimpy cores is the model already dominating the
>>> world.   
>> 
>> Got a source that backs up that claim?  I was recently dancing with
>> Netflix and they don't match your claim, nor do the other content
>> delivery networks, they want every cycle they can get.
> 
> Netflix has how many machines? I'd say in general that principle
> holds: this is the age of huge distributed computation systems, the
> most you can pay for a single core before it tops out is in the
> hundreds of dollars, not in the millions like it used to be. The high
> end isn't very high up, and we scale by adding boxes and cores, not
> by getting single CPUs that are unusually fast.
> 
> Taking the other way of looking at it, from what I understand,
> CDN boxes are about I/O and not CPU, though I could be wrong. I can
> ask some of the Netflix people, a former report of mine is one of the
> people behind their front end cache boxes and we keep in touch.
> 
> Perry
> -- 
> Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com

Some weird stuff gets built for CDNs!  We had a real-time video transcoding project at Quanta using Tilera chips to do transcoding on demand for retrofitting systems in China with millions of old cable boxes.  Not I/O limited at all!  There was a <lot> of I/O but still more computing.
-L