So it follows the trend to offload special processing just as we do now with
graphics to make tasks like multi-texturing fast enough to be affordable in
the rendering pipeline (frame rate economies are the ultimate real-time hack
because the user experiences them immediately and appreciably).
Imagine a processor per language. Gack!
Or, one bottle of perfume per person to match their distinctive pheromones.
Interoperability just became a survival of the species requirement. :-)
len
From: [mailto:]
Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2007 10:57 AM
In short, the CPU designers are running out of gas. Single cores won't be
getting much faster, but it will be cheaper to get lots more of cores, or
to use the free transistors for other things. You see this trend in the
evolution from single to dual to quad cores in mainstream CPUs. So, it
will get increasingly tempting to do work like XML parsing and decryption
in parallel with other activities. When to do it on spare general purpose
cores on your main chip, vs. on outboard general purpose boxes (which will
have lots of cores too) vs. in specialized functions in either place will
be interesting to watch in coming years.
