http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CESEX...

I bet we'll see 256 one of these days.

John

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CESEX...

I bet we'll see 256 one of these days.

John

John Larkin <jjlarkin at (no spam) highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:



http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CESEXHWXUFJNKQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=207600531


I bet we'll see 256 one of these days.

I doubt it. A mailman won't deliver mail faster when he is using a
Ferrari instead of bicycle. I think we are going to see slower,
cheaper, more energy efficient computers with back-to-basic software
for every day / office use.

For example an embedded ARM or MIPS system running at 300MHz has
enough power to run most common applications. It consumes at least 10
times less energy compared to a standard PC.

Maybe. But there's certainly no trend in that direction yet. Vista is
even more bloated than XP. My conjecture is that multiple cpu's on one
chip will make computers simpler and more efficient, and certainly
more reliable.

On Thu, 08 May 2008 20:42:42 GMT, nico at (no spam) puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel)
wrote:

John Larkin <jjlarkin at (no spam) highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:



http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CESEXHWXUFJNKQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=207600531


I bet we'll see 256 one of these days.

I doubt it. A mailman won't deliver mail faster when he is using a
Ferrari instead of bicycle. I think we are going to see slower,
cheaper, more energy efficient computers with back-to-basic software
for every day / office use.

Maybe. But there's certainly no trend in that direction yet. Vista is
even more bloated than XP. My conjecture is that multiple cpu's on one
chip will make computers simpler and more efficient, and certainly
more reliable.



For example an embedded ARM or MIPS system running at 300MHz has
enough power to run most common applications. It consumes at least 10
times less energy compared to a standard PC.

Oh, things are coming along nicely:

http://www.sun.com/emrkt/innercircle/newsletter/0407feature.html

"Sun foresees the need for extending thread count beyond 64 separate
instances of a computer, which is why the chip that will follow
UltraSPARC T2 (currently code-named Victoria Falls) is being designed
to have 128 threads. These threads, however, will be fully extendible.
This will make it possible to link two instances of Victoria Falls —
both sharing common memory through a hub chip — for a grand total of
256 threads."

Just threads, not full cpu's [1], but it looks good.

Here's one PPC and eight smaller processors on one chip:

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/multicore.CellBE.html


John

[1] I kept the apostrophe so that people whose expertise stops at 20
KHz can have something clever to say. But to me, cpus looks awkward;
you'd pronounce it "seepuss."

Spehro Pefhany wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Apostrophe Police wrote:
Eeyore wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CESEXHWXUFJNKQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=207600531

I bet we'll see 256 one of these days.

But when will we see you cease using the greengrocers' apostrophe ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Greengrocers.27_apostrophes

Where exactly in John's post did you see one of those?

--
Rich Grise, Self-Appointed Chief,
Apostrophe Police

How about the subject line ?

That's not one of them Greengrocers' apostrophe's

Actually it is. See the article I linked to. A lovely example one sees even today in some British pubs on the menu is
"fish and chip's".

Maybe it should now be called the 'publicans' apostrophe' ? There's few greengrocers still around these days.

-- rather that's a
standard (now largely deprecated) way of pluralizing abbreviations.
It's the method I was taught in school, and if you search the New York
Times archives you'll find frequent examples up until a few years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe

A damn ex-colonial abberation of course ! ;~)


"An apostrophe is used by some writers to form a plural for
abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols where adding just s rather than
's may leave things ambiguous or inelegant.

I've yet to see any written precedent for this.


While British English
formerly endorsed the use of such apostrophes after numbers and dates,
this usage has now largely been superseded"

Quite so.


Personally, I think it's less ambiguous in some cases so I'd rather
see it used for all cases, but I guess the (spit) prescriptivists have
won this round.

Eh ?

Lets see; plurals should not be formed by the use of apostrophes. Seems simple enough to me. For example, for
clarity, rather than pcb's I use PCBs.

Would you seriously think of talking of diode's, resistor's or transistor's ?

Certainly not, but NPN's and BJT's, and even 1N4148's all look right

On Wed, 07 May 2008 19:48:31 -0700, in sci.electronics.design John
Larkin <jjlarkin at (no spam) highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:



http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CESEXHWXUFJNKQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=207600531


I bet we'll see 256 one of these days.

John


How about one of these
http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=291


martin

On Thu, 8 May 2008 07:42:04 -0700 (PDT), MooseFET <kensmith at (no spam) rahul.net
wrote:

On May 7, 7:48 pm, John Larkin
jjlar... at (no spam) highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CESEX...

I bet we'll see 256 one of these days.

When you get to large numbers of CPUs it seems to make sense to stop
making them identical. For servers this would be doubly so. Many of
the CPUs won't need to do floating point operations.

Right. Amybe a few cpu's would have serious floating point power, or a
few separate fp engines could be assigned to cpu's as needed. Lots of
cpu's, doing stuff like file i/o or serial stuff, could be less
powerful. I suppose we'll always need special graphics hardware, but
just a few of those per chip.

It also would make sense to do things like memory moves in the "Memory
Mismanagement Unit" since the values don't need to be modified on the
way through.

This will make it a lot harder to say how many CPUs are in a chip. If
there is only as much hardware as 200 full CPUs but 500 threads can be
running at the same time, do you call it 200 or 500 CPUs.

Next step is to get rid of task swapping and threads altogether. One
CPU is the OS, and one cpu gets assigned per process.

On Thu, 08 May 2008 23:01:24 +0100, the renowned Eeyore
rabbitsfriendsandrelations at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:



Spehro Pefhany wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Apostrophe Police wrote:
Eeyore wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CESEXHWXUFJNKQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=207600531

I bet we'll see 256 one of these days.

But when will we see you cease using the greengrocers' apostrophe ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Greengrocers.27_apostrophes

Where exactly in John's post did you see one of those?

--
Rich Grise, Self-Appointed Chief,
Apostrophe Police

How about the subject line ?

That's not one of them Greengrocers' apostrophe's

Actually it is. See the article I linked to. A lovely example one sees even today in some British pubs on the menu is
"fish and chip's".

Maybe it should now be called the 'publicans' apostrophe' ? There's few greengrocers still around these days.



-- rather that's a
standard (now largely deprecated) way of pluralizing abbreviations.
It's the method I was taught in school, and if you search the New York
Times archives you'll find frequent examples up until a few years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe

A damn ex-colonial abberation of course ! ;~)


"An apostrophe is used by some writers to form a plural for
abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols where adding just s rather than
's may leave things ambiguous or inelegant.

I've yet to see any written precedent for this.


While British English
formerly endorsed the use of such apostrophes after numbers and dates,
this usage has now largely been superseded"

Quite so.


Personally, I think it's less ambiguous in some cases so I'd rather
see it used for all cases, but I guess the (spit) prescriptivists have
won this round.

Eh ?

Lets see; plurals should not be formed by the use of apostrophes. Seems simple enough to me. For example, for
clarity, rather than pcb's I use PCBs.

Would you seriously think of talking of diode's, resistor's or transistor's ?

Certainly not, but NPN's and BJT's, and even 1N4148's all look right

to me. And if I want to connect the Vss's together on two chips, is
there any sensible alternative?

In article <3n6624pu6762nup9apu3crj5vh1uu6fqbn at (no spam) 4ax.com>,
jjlarkin at (no spam) highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com says...
On Thu, 8 May 2008 07:42:04 -0700 (PDT), MooseFET <kensmith at (no spam) rahul.net
wrote:

On May 7, 7:48 pm, John Larkin
jjlar... at (no spam) highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CESEX...

I bet we'll see 256 one of these days.

When you get to large numbers of CPUs it seems to make sense to stop
making them identical. For servers this would be doubly so. Many of
the CPUs won't need to do floating point operations.

Right. Amybe a few cpu's would have serious floating point power, or a
few separate fp engines could be assigned to cpu's as needed. Lots of
cpu's, doing stuff like file i/o or serial stuff, could be less
powerful. I suppose we'll always need special graphics hardware, but
just a few of those per chip.

Asymmetric multiprocessing makes the scheduler's life more
complicated. Since the scheduler is part of the OS, and the OS is
most often M$, this isn't a good idea, IMO. Hardware is cheap
(so cheap PowerPC is including decimal FPUs). Throw the FPU on
every node, whether its needed or not.

It also would make sense to do things like memory moves in the "Memory
Mismanagement Unit" since the values don't need to be modified on the
way through.

This will make it a lot harder to say how many CPUs are in a chip. If
there is only as much hardware as 200 full CPUs but 500 threads can be
running at the same time, do you call it 200 or 500 CPUs.

Next step is to get rid of task swapping and threads altogether. One
CPU is the OS, and one cpu gets assigned per process.

Which negates what you say above. Running a task, then getting an
exception because you don't have an instruction you thought you had
is expensive.

On Fri, 9 May 2008 22:27:56 -0400, krw <krw at (no spam) att.bizzzzzzzzzz> wrote:

In article <3n6624pu6762nup9apu3crj5vh1uu6fqbn at (no spam) 4ax.com>,
jjlarkin at (no spam) highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com says...
On Thu, 8 May 2008 07:42:04 -0700 (PDT), MooseFET <kensmith at (no spam) rahul.net
wrote:

On May 7, 7:48 pm, John Larkin
jjlar... at (no spam) highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CESEX...

I bet we'll see 256 one of these days.

When you get to large numbers of CPUs it seems to make sense to stop
making them identical. For servers this would be doubly so. Many of
the CPUs won't need to do floating point operations.

Right. Amybe a few cpu's would have serious floating point power, or a
few separate fp engines could be assigned to cpu's as needed. Lots of
cpu's, doing stuff like file i/o or serial stuff, could be less
powerful. I suppose we'll always need special graphics hardware, but
just a few of those per chip.

Asymmetric multiprocessing makes the scheduler's life more
complicated. Since the scheduler is part of the OS, and the OS is
most often M$, this isn't a good idea, IMO. Hardware is cheap
(so cheap PowerPC is including decimal FPUs). Throw the FPU on
every node, whether its needed or not.

It also would make sense to do things like memory moves in the "Memory
Mismanagement Unit" since the values don't need to be modified on the
way through.

This will make it a lot harder to say how many CPUs are in a chip. If
there is only as much hardware as 200 full CPUs but 500 threads can be
running at the same time, do you call it 200 or 500 CPUs.

Next step is to get rid of task swapping and threads altogether. One
CPU is the OS, and one cpu gets assigned per process.

Which negates what you say above. Running a task, then getting an
exception because you don't have an instruction you thought you had
is expensive.

Why would you get an exception? If a device driver doesn't need fp
opcodes, run it on one of the many cpu's that doesn't have floating
point. And vice versa. <> rocket science.

On Sat, 10 May 2008 06:42:01 -0700 (PDT), MooseFET

kensm... at (no spam) rahul.net> wrote:
Which negates what you say above. Running a task, then getting an
exception because you don't have an instruction you thought you had
is expensive.

But if you know which tasks never do floating operations, you can
leave them on the CPU without an FPU. If you don't know you only need
to perform the experiment once and suffer the overhead of moving the
task to a different CPU once.

Why experiment?
I was only defending against an objection that I assumed would be

Every task image would have a header

that identifies
what it is, what it does, what version it is, who wrote it when, what
resources it needs, and anything else anybody would want to know.

And
it would have a unique identifier that leads to a web page that
explains its functions and history in detail, and includes source
code.


John

John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 10 May 2008 06:42:01 -0700 (PDT), MooseFET
kensmith at (no spam) rahul.net> wrote:

You are suggesting a hardware fix for a problem that doesn't need to
exist.


But the problem does exist. I suggest that different hardware, and an
accompanying OS and set of rules, would make most of the nightmarish
problems of modern pc's impossible.


The nightmarish problems of modern PCs are an artefact of the "ship it
and be damned" management culture in some software shops. And the very
openness of the PC architecture which allows zillions of permutations of
imperfectly written drivers.

The Mac OS demonstrates that good
programmers in a closed, disciplined environment *can* do a decent job
using traditional CPU architectures, but the fact that they are an
exception suggests that a more-hardware/less-software approach to
managing resources would be better for everyone.


It might be at least for thread management.


Engineers are, on average, better thinkers than programmers. Perhaps


And they are so modest with it...

because engineers generally admire simplicity, whereas programmers
admire complexity.


I count myself as an engineer in that respect. I don't think there are
many programmers who admire unnecessary complexity. There are far too
many that do not know enough about classical algorithms though.


Intel and Microsoft still haven't come up with a way to keep from
executing data and stacks!


Oh yes they have! Hardware assist and software to go with it. An
implementation was included in XP(SP2) the Data Execution Prevention
using the NOEX page exception mechanism. It isn't perfect - nothing ever
is, but it is a big step forward. See

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457155.aspx

Regards,
Martin Brown

John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 10 May 2008 06:42:01 -0700 (PDT), MooseFET
kensmith at (no spam) rahul.net> wrote:

You are suggesting a hardware fix for a problem that doesn't need to
exist.

But the problem does exist. I suggest that different hardware, and an
accompanying OS and set of rules, would make most of the nightmarish
problems of modern pc's impossible.

The nightmarish problems of modern PCs are an artefact of the "ship it
and be damned" management culture in some software shops. And the very
openness of the PC architecture which allows zillions of permutations of
imperfectly written drivers.

The Mac OS demonstrates that good
programmers in a closed, disciplined environment *can* do a decent job
using traditional CPU architectures, but the fact that they are an
exception suggests that a more-hardware/less-software approach to
managing resources would be better for everyone.

It might be at least for thread management.

Engineers are, on average, better thinkers than programmers. Perhaps

And they are so modest with it...

because engineers generally admire simplicity, whereas programmers
admire complexity.

I count myself as an engineer in that respect. I don't think there are
many programmers who admire unnecessary complexity. There are far too
many that do not know enough about classical algorithms though.

Intel and Microsoft still haven't come up with a way to keep from
executing data and stacks!

Oh yes they have! Hardware assist and software to go with it. An
implementation was included in XP(SP2) the Data Execution Prevention
using the NOEX page exception mechanism. It isn't perfect - nothing ever
is, but it is a big step forward. See

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457155.aspx