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Do you mean that we clung to single threaded compute for too long? Like we spent too many transistors on just making one fast core because it's easy to write co
by computerphage 6y ago
Do you mean that we clung to single threaded compute for too long? Like we spent too many transistors on just making one fast core because it's easy to write code to use one core?
- ghaff 6y agoIntel at least absolutely clung to clock speed and one core for software reasons--in large part because of pressure from a certain very important software partner. But multicore on a single (mostly) general purpose architecture (leaving aside vector instructions) is still easier from a software perspective than the very heterogeneous architecture--vector, array, FPGA, etc.--we're increasingly adopting.
- epmaybe 6y ago> very important software partner are you referring to microsoft?
- ghaff 6y agoYes. A senior Intel exec told me around the time multicore was coming in something to the effect of "Of course we knew we had to switch from frequency to multicore but Microsoft was terrified of the software implications of moving away from pure instruction level parallelism." This was of course somewhat self-serving given all the criticism Intel caught for being slow to adopt multicore. But there were certainly concerns about software support at the time, especially on the desktop. (In the end, it ended up not being as big a problem as some were fearing for various reasons. But it was a real fear at the time.)