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."

Comments

Re:Niagara Myths

[turgid]

Yes, Sun states a lot of things.

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.