Please ask yourself why Intel and AMD are doing this. Is it just for fun? No.
There is a reason that they MUST do this. The increase in gigahertz cannot last forever because there is a concept called the speed of light. I've seen numbers that say that at 10GHz it would take one entire cycle to move three centimeters.
So, as Andrei Alexandrescu puts it, the hardware guys put a dead body in our [software guys] trunks and make us take care of it with threading.
In fact, go to the expert: Alexandrescu with Meyers is leading an effort to define some sort of memory model in c++.
Also check out his lock-free data structures. That's right! Lock-free.
That is peer review. Peer review doesn't stop at the journal boundary. Papers on quantum mechanics still get published even though everyone knows that quantum mechanics does not describe all the universe (gravity).
Everyone knows there are mistakes in science. People make mistakes. As long as there are lots of eyeballs someone will find it out.
I have reviewed papers and usually it is hard to understand everything the person is putting forth.
Peer review at the journal boundary is not exhaustive; nor should it be.
Any scientist worth anything doesn't believe an article they read as gospel. It is a data point with error bars. There are is no fact in science; there is only hypothesis.
Therefore, if results are tainted it will be found at some sort when someone tries to build upon the knowledge the tainted results broached.
However, if a person doesn't get quite the same results as someone else there certainly is peer pressure (herd mentality). So, science-system correction is not fast. It is slow.
I want to state that again because this is different then how technology development works (read: slashdot ppl).
Science moves slowly. Technology moves quickly. Most techology doesn't require rigorous reproducibility as techology is market driven.
My person feeling why this sort of behavior exists is because scientists place market value on their research. There is a phrase for this: "Publish or Die."
Finally, science is not irrefutable, nor does it pretend to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Please ask yourself why Intel and AMD are doing this. Is it just for fun? No.
There is a reason that they MUST do this. The increase in gigahertz cannot last forever because there is a concept called the speed of light. I've seen numbers that say that at 10GHz it would take one entire cycle to move three centimeters.
So, as Andrei Alexandrescu puts it, the hardware guys put a dead body in our [software guys] trunks and make us take care of it with threading.
In fact, go to the expert: Alexandrescu with Meyers is leading an effort to define some sort of memory model in c++.
Also check out his lock-free data structures. That's right! Lock-free.
That is peer review. Peer review doesn't stop at the journal boundary. Papers on quantum mechanics still get published even though everyone knows that quantum mechanics does not describe all the universe (gravity).
Everyone knows there are mistakes in science. People make mistakes. As long as there are lots of eyeballs someone will find it out.
I have reviewed papers and usually it is hard to understand everything the person is putting forth.
Peer review at the journal boundary is not exhaustive; nor should it be.
Any scientist worth anything doesn't believe an article they read as gospel. It is a data point with error bars. There are is no fact in science; there is only hypothesis.
Therefore, if results are tainted it will be found at some sort when someone tries to build upon the knowledge the tainted results broached.
However, if a person doesn't get quite the same results as someone else there certainly is peer pressure (herd mentality). So, science-system correction is not fast. It is slow.
I want to state that again because this is different then how technology development works (read: slashdot ppl).
Science moves slowly. Technology moves quickly.
Most techology doesn't require rigorous reproducibility as techology is market driven.
My person feeling why this sort of behavior exists is because scientists place market value on their research. There is a phrase for this: "Publish or Die."
Finally, science is not irrefutable, nor does it pretend to be.
The memory footprint of firefox and thunderbird are too large.
If they weren't so fat then older processors/memory buses would be able to handle them fine.