River Trail — Intel's Parallel JavaScript

mikejuk writes "Intel has just announced River Trail, an extension of JavaScript that brings parallel programming into the browser. The code looks like JavaScript and it works with HTML5, including Canvas and WebGL, so 2D and 3D graphics are easy. A demo video shows an in-browser simulation going from 3 to 45 fps and using all eight cores of the processor. This is the sort of performance needed if 3D in-browser games are going to be practical. You can download River Trail as a Firefox add-on and start coding now. Who needs native code?"

Comments

Who needs native code?

[nicholas22]

CPUs

Re:Fuck parallel programming.

[TheRaven64]

Not entirely. One of the features of Sun's cancelled Rock CPU was something they called Thread Scout. The idea was to run one core ahead of another, skipping most computation, to pre-fault memory addresses. This ensured that data was in cache when it was needed. There was also an idea to use multiple cores to extend the superscalar concept, so when you encountered a branch one core took each potential path and you discarded the wrong one. A lot of GPUs used to do this, but no general purpose CPUs (that I'm aware of, although ARM and Itanium do something similar with their predicated instructions).

You're right that you won't get the full benefit of writing proper concurrent code, but you will get some.

Oh boy!!!

[frank_adrian314159]

That means the animated ads can now suck up all of my CPU, rather than just one core's worth. I can't wait!