4 ms·
It depends what you mean by hard to use. If it's an obsure architecture for which assembler, compiler, linker, the whole toolchain is not easily available, then
by fizixer 11y ago
It depends what you mean by hard to use. If it's an obsure architecture for which assembler, compiler, linker, the whole toolchain is not easily available, then the difficulty has nothing to do with the high core count.
Also I'm not sure why a simpler core (note: simple architecture not slower core) would be so slow that it would be unusable. I mean such cores are called "speed demon" for a reason I assume.
I personally would love to see 256-core 64-bit ARM-compatible becoming mainstream (by compatible I mean take the ARM instruction set and reduce it in half or a quarter).
- pjc50 11y agoThe Tilera architecture required assembler for effective usage due to its idiosyncracies. The main problem is access to DRAM is a terrible bottleneck, and adding cores makes this worse if they all need to access it. You can fill a die with ALUs but unless you can keep them fed this doesn't help you at all. That's why Tilera focused on the network stream use case; there's enough storage on-die for a few frames per core, and the data to operate on can "flow" through the system from one 10G Ethernet MAC to another.