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I fail to see why such an infrastructure would've been unnecessary if Moore's law had not ended. Architecture has become crazy heterogeneous by now. It was het
by fizixer 7y ago
I fail to see why such an infrastructure would've been unnecessary if Moore's law had not ended.
Architecture has become crazy heterogeneous by now. It was heterogeneous enough to warrant such a thing 10 years ago. Better late than never.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago> I fail to see why such an infrastructure would've been unnecessary if Moore's law had not ended. This is because Moore's Law in the heyday of the 1990's provided a 2X boost every 18 months to software for "free". This meant for many cases, it was a waste of engineering time to try to optimize other than selecting good algorithms.
- thrower123 7y agoIt's been dead for 20 years. Fucking people need to start caring about clock cycles again, and not running bloated Electron UI elements.
- throwaway17_17 7y agoI am in full agreement with you here, however, I got in before the obligatory ‘developer time is worth more than CPU time’ post which is often the response to comments like yours. It seems to be the most frequent dismissive comment anytime performance comes up on HN. I find this analogous to the ‘pre-mature optimization is the root of all evil’ comment that seems to be the most popular on StackOverflow. As a note, I’m not too interested in MLIR because I have not seen it applied to any of the areas that interest/effect me. But I guess I will remain slightly optimistic about the possibilities.
- Gibbon1 7y agoI remember seeing someones rough estimates about effort required to automate a task vs the time saved by not having to manually perform it. Their claim was automation wins a lot more than you would think. Consider you have 4 workers using your software. Doesn't take much of them having to wait around for your slow ass software before you need 5 workers.
- lioeters 7y agoHere's the reference: Is It Worth the Time? https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoI am not disagreeing with you. I am describing what the case was when it was not dead.
- wbl 7y agoIt hasn't been. Denard scaling is what ended 20 years ago, hence multicore and vector architectures.
- Haga 7y agoRam never kept up so it always was Moores law in ram sleep
- vardump 7y agoAgreed. Widely distributed software should be power optimized. Megawatts shouldn't be needlessly wasted.
- pizlonator 7y agoI have no idea why you’re being downvoted. I thought the same. Like, even before the end of Moore’s law, folks were making spectacular advancements in IR design and compiler design generally. SSA was invented before it ended for example. The lineage of graph coloring register allocators that culminates in Briggs and then later IRC started in the 80s or earlier at IBM Yorktown. It’s crazy to suggest that the end of Moore’s law means we now suddenly have to start thinking about how to build good compiler architectures. [edit: fix date, 80s not 60s]
- pjmlp 7y agoIt goes earlier than that, after all most mainframes, starting with Burroughs Large Systems have been making use of IR based toolchains. The research paper about the PL/8 (also known as PL.8) compiler toolchain, used by IBM for their RISC research, is the oldest I have read were they proud themselves of having a toolchain quite similar to the initial LLVM design.
- jacobush 7y agoNo matter the computer technology, I find that IBM did it first and had their own name for it. Someone ™ should compile a list of IBM nomenclature and list it next to contemporary names. Bonus points for including other languages, IBM had translations for French, German, Swedish and who-knows-what other languages.
- kristianp 7y ago"for the End of Moore’s Law" seems like meaningless clickbait in this context.