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That's how I feel. I used FPGAs in the late 90s and wanted to try making a parallel chip with say 1024 cores and a few K of RAM per core and then program it wi
by zackmorris 9y ago
That's how I feel. I used FPGAs in the late 90s and wanted to try making a parallel chip with say 1024 cores and a few K of RAM per core and then program it with something like Erlang. Then the dot bomb happened, then the housing bomb, the Great Recession, and so on and so forth. The big players got more entrenched so everything was evolutionary instead of revolutionary and I'd say computer engineering (my major, never used) got set back 10-15 years.
But that said, I'm excited that 90s technology is finally being adopted by the AI world. I'm also hopeful that all these languages like Elixir, Go and MATLAB/Octave will let us do concurrent programming in ways that are less painful than say OpenCL/CUDA.
- jacobush 9y agoSo true. Also, the transputer. The tech is catching up. FPGAs, cores on graphics cards. Different implementations, same patterns as late 90s tech.
- agumonkey 9y agoTBH, seeing Chuck Moore talk about its GreenArray forth silicon gave me the inspiration. Since all cores are ALU+RAM and can send data/code to neighbors you get a "smart buffer". I found it so damn exciting I can't stop dreaming about this. Even a subset of the idea, having blit in ram (swap, row/col-zeroing, etc etc) could reduce pressure on the memory bus.
- abecedarius 9y agoHave you read about the J-machine? An older research machine that was sort of like that. Trouble is that we need to change software and hardware together to really reap the advantage.