Hardware Headaches Inevitable?

JaneWalker6847 writes "Don Becker, co-founder of the Beowulf project, describes the inevitability of hardware administration headaches and warns users not to expect a silver bullet to solve these problems." From the article: "We're about to see another revolution, which is in network adapters -- that we [will] talk directly to [them] from application level. That's a massive change in how you interface with them. And that brings about a new round of device drivers completely unlike the device drivers we had 10 years ago. So, that part of the world isn't going to stabilize anytime soon."

Comments

This guy is worth listening to

[vtcodger]

The article doesn't mention it, but Donald Becker is, I'm quite sure, the guy who wrote most of the Linux NIC drivers. I think that anything he says about hardware interfaces and their future is probably worth reading.

It looks to me like he's telling us that drivers are not likely to go away as an issue any time soon. Too bad, but if Becker says so, he's very likely right.

memory bandwidth

[Gr8Apes]

This comment makes me think again about AMD's acquisition of ATI. Would AMD put an ATI graphics core in the CPU package? (HTT allows for all the bandwidth the GPU could handle - no separate cache needed). Need a faster GPU? By the time you do - there'll be a faster CPU with a new GPU included, and this packaging might be less expensive than the current high end cards.

This combination would also work fine for 90% of the world's computer users, and possibly be much cheaper. Think Sempron with RAM and a miniscule motherboard with ports. The $100 laptop might drop in price.