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I don't know about the standard offerings on cloud platforms, but people who do some sort of scientific computing care a great deal about the architecture and p
by namirez 8y ago
I don't know about the standard offerings on cloud platforms, but people who do some sort of scientific computing care a great deal about the architecture and performance. As a C++ programmer, I'm constantly profiling my code to find out bottlenecks and optimize the code. Sometimes I even care if the CPU supports say AVX or some specific instructions.
- jdietrich 8y agoFrom my comment: "the future of computing clearly involves an increasing number of specialised architectures and instruction sets". I'm not saying that nobody cares about the choice of architecture, I'm saying that major tech companies with vast quantities of servers are beginning to develop their own silicon with custom architectures and custom instruction sets, precisely because that's vastly more efficient than using a general-purpose architecture that happens to be popular in the wider software ecosystem. The fact that nobody else uses that special-purpose architecture is unimportant, because it is economically viable for them to invest in tooling and training to write and port software for these weird chips.