3 ms·
> the speed ratio between CPU and main memory is several orders of magnitude What if you compare scratchpad SRAM and an energy-efficient CPU?
by qznc 10y ago
> the speed ratio between CPU and main memory is several orders of magnitude
What if you compare scratchpad SRAM and an energy-efficient CPU?
- pjc50 10y agoCompare in what way? e.g. the L1 cache is SRAM running at core speed with low latency (4 cycles for Haswell).
- qznc 10y agoA factor of 4 instead of orders of magnitude means a Forth machine might still be worthwhile. No?
- pjc50 10y agoWhere's the Forth machine getting its operands from? Sure, if you constrain your programs to use a tiny area of memory you might be able to achieve theoretical speed, but what workloads can you achieve with that? If you were to write a browser in Forth, presumably it would still have to store all its DOM in DRAM?
- qznc 10y agoYou probably want to parallelize the browser for energy efficiency. Then you can distributed the DOM across the scratchpads of hundreds of cores maybe?
- pjc50 10y agoSo each core has its own JS engine, or when you iterate across the DOM with a selector you have to query across all the nodes? This doesn't sound great. (The "pile of cores with scratchpads" exists e.g. Tilera and Netronome, and they're a right pain to program for)