3 ms·

I’m having a hard time coming up with anything that a modern OS on a modern CPU can’t do - they’re about as general purpose as can be for any nontrivial but nua

I’m having a hard time coming up with anything that a modern OS on a modern CPU can’t do - they’re about as general purpose as can be for any nontrivial but nuanced definition of “general purpose.” The only exception I can think of is real-time IO, which we offload to specialized chips with buffers and queues through PCIe and other busses. However, that’s a physical limitation since these peripherals would be impractical to implement in software until FPGA tech improves and gets significantly cheaper.

seniorivn 6y ago
run a technologically secure code, with root of trust in cryptography/security model your software uses On modern pc/server/mobile computers it's impossible, your root of trust there is manufacturer and their microcode/embedded security modules with separate operating system etc
- grawprog 6y ago
  Yeah...even 'general purpose' computers are shipped with hardware level 'software' that's beyond access from users. Intel and AMD have their management engines, Microsoft's got their in with uefi. I'm not sure if there even are any modern processors available with the kind of access allowed by 8 and 16-bit CPUs...
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
There's a lot you can't do, or can only do too slowly to be useful. This is why scientific and commercial mainframes still exist, and why a lot of computing is offloaded to cloud services, relegating the modern OS on a modern CPU to a client system. There are also entirely classes of fairly conventional applications - A(G)I, true holographic displays, pseudo-real telepresence, real-time photo-realistic rendering (although that's starting to become possible), distributed non-localised filesystems, associative semantic storage of all kinds - that modern hardware is still too slow for. And more speculative classes too. In fact contemporary hardware is mostly quite slow and dumb. It's incredibly fast, small, and cheap compared to a mid-80s mainframe, but it's going to look very underpowered and crude fifty years from now.

seniorivn 6y ago

run a technologically secure code, with root of trust in cryptography/security model your software uses On modern pc/server/mobile computers it's impossible, your root of trust there is manufacturer and their microcode/embedded security modules with separate operating system etc

grawprog 6y ago
Yeah...even 'general purpose' computers are shipped with hardware level 'software' that's beyond access from users. Intel and AMD have their management engines, Microsoft's got their in with uefi. I'm not sure if there even are any modern processors available with the kind of access allowed by 8 and 16-bit CPUs...

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

There's a lot you can't do, or can only do too slowly to be useful. This is why scientific and commercial mainframes still exist, and why a lot of computing is offloaded to cloud services, relegating the modern OS on a modern CPU to a client system. There are also entirely classes of fairly conventional applications - A(G)I, true holographic displays, pseudo-real telepresence, real-time photo-realistic rendering (although that's starting to become possible), distributed non-localised filesystems, associative semantic storage of all kinds - that modern hardware is still too slow for. And more speculative classes too. In fact contemporary hardware is mostly quite slow and dumb. It's incredibly fast, small, and cheap compared to a mid-80s mainframe, but it's going to look very underpowered and crude fifty years from now.