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A plausible tl;dr of the post could be: "Dreaming up high level instruction sets is useless because today's CPU's spend most of their time waiting for memory ac
by chetanahuja 11y ago
A plausible tl;dr of the post could be: "Dreaming up high level instruction sets is useless because today's CPU's spend most of their time waiting for memory access (accept for rare applications doing lots of math on a small amount of data ... e.g. bitcoin mining)
- userbinator 11y agoDreaming up high level instruction sets is useless because today's CPU's spend most of their time waiting for memory access ...which doesn't make much sense, because the benefit of small but powerful multicycle instructions is precisely so you can spend the time decoding and executing them (and less time fetching them) while the CPU is waiting for some memory access. One factor that many people seem to forget is that instructions also need to be fetched from memory, and the less bandwidth that takes, the better.
- chetanahuja 11y agoNot defending the OP's thesis but clarifying my tl;dr summary of it: Fetching instructions is not the main problem, it's the data that the instructions have to act upon (Hence the exception for the compute heavy, data-light applications.) And since most of the compute power in the world today is basically processing and moving massive amounts of data around, I can see how that thesis would make sense in the general case.
- kragen 11y agoIf that were true, we'd all be using desktop Tera MTAs by now.