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SW Weenies: Ready for CMT?
tbray writes "The hardware guys are getting ready to toss this big hairy package over the wall: CMT (Chip Multi Threading) and TLP (Thread Level Parallelism). Think about a chip that isn't that fast but runs 32 threads in hardware. This year, more threads next year. How do you make your code run fast? Anyhow, I was just at a high-level Sun meeting about this stuff, and we don't know the answers, but I pulled together some of the questions."
"You can only make a Steam engine so big but you cannot connect them together to get more power"
That has to be bar none one of the DUMBEST things I have ever heard on slashdot.
Mind you I understand it was not you that said it, no problem there, but whoever said that originally had best stay away from ANYTHING mechanical.
I heard the same talk under NDA about a bit over 6 months ago. They're just hyping their warez, it's nothing special. They're talking about multi-core CPUs like what just came out from AMD, and "hyperthreading" like what Intel has had for a while. They're basically playing catchup, and poorly. If they were smart they'd have dumped future plans for the UltraSparcs a few years ago and started transitioning to Solaris on x86s and especially Opterons, and possibly built some fat custom hardware in a similar vein to the SunFire series servers around the Opteron architecture.
11*43+456^2
Judging Sun on its processor track record of the last decade, the follow-on chips will be a year to two years late, under clockspeed and have over-all performance barely comparable with that of the more conventional competition.
Not that I'm cynical or anything.
I'm sure intel will be able to cobble together something with 4 pentium-m cores in it to compete, and AMD will have 4-core Opterons. And, as I said in my previous post, they'll be better suited to running general workloads, and will cope equally well with the multi-threaded ones.
Sun just doesn't seem to get it. Not everyone wants to run Solaris and Java.
Ask Sun if they will provide the IP necessary to get Linux ported to Niagara and Niagara 2.
Stick Men
If you were at uni for "computer science" your prof's did you a disservice.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.