3 ms·
Lots of simple cores would be inherently better.
by api 9y ago
Lots of simple cores would be inherently better.
- pjc50 9y agoBut much harder to program and not effective for speeding up quite a lot of software.
- bboozzoo 9y agoIsn't that exactly what made PS3 hard to develop for?
- scott_karana 9y agoYep. It bad to develop for, and left lots on the table compared to its contemporary Xbox 360, despite "theoretically" better specs. 1 The Cell processor was never used in any other consoles, and the IBM Roadrunner supercomputer using them ended up being replaced by Cray+AMD hardware. 1 https://kotaku.com/5885358/why-skyrim-didnt-play-nice-with-the-ps3 https://kotaku.com/5885358/why-skyrim-didnt-play-nice-with-t... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner
- jcranmer 9y agoThat's the Xeon Phi concept... which is apparently being taken out back and shot. Our current programming paradigms don't adapt well to massive parallelism, except for some small classes of "embarassingly parallel" problems (e.g., make -jN).
- api 9y agoMost of what we do is pretty parallel: web hosting, servicing requests, databases, hosting tons of VMs and containers, etc. I don't buy it. My guess on Phi is that it wasn't a big win over fewer deeper cores and so there was not much market. This might change things a bit.
- pmoriarty 9y agoThere are also GreenArrays chips, like the GA144.[1] 144 cores on a chip. The downside (or upside) is that they're desgined for running Forth, and are not x86 compatible. http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB001-100503-GA144-1-10.pdf http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB001-100...