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Many computer architectures struggle with arithmetic vs. memory performance. A typical CPU can do a lot of computation per unit of time, but ends up starved bec

Many computer architectures struggle with arithmetic vs. memory performance. A typical CPU can do a lot of computation per unit of time, but ends up starved because of low memory bandwidth. I hope that we see either an existing fast memory technology become cheap, or a new technology arise that will bridge this gap. I think modern day CPUs and GPUs remain underappreciated and not used to their full potential because of how hard it is to program around slow memory… Seriously, we don't need esoteric new computer architectures, just give us cheap fast memory in a dumb flat memory hierarchy that is easy to program for.

chubot 6y ago
It feels like there's fundamentally a tradeoff between "fast and flat" and "big". So basically I would guess NUMA and programming models that take it into account is the future. And maybe software management of CPU cache. I think wanting fast, flat, and big is sort of like wanting the CAP theorem to go away... "it sure would be great" if we could have an infinitely scalable SQL database without any programming model changes. In other words, no matter how "fast" a memory becomes, someone's going to want it "bigger", which makes things slower.