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People have been warning developers to 'get ready for multithreading' for at least a decade and somehow everything is mostly the same. Mostly because of abstrac
by Devilboy 15y ago
People have been warning developers to 'get ready for multithreading' for at least a decade and somehow everything is mostly the same. Mostly because of abstractions (e.g. on GPUs) and also because the USERS of our software are ALSO getting parallelised! So we're back to one thread for one user, since most of the time you really don't want to do loads of work for one user request. Cases where parallelism matters (graphics, data stores, query engines) are already pretty solid on multithreading anyway.
Meh.
- wladimir 15y agosomehow everything is mostly the same Because it's really hard to let go of the "cosy" single-threaded, sequential model. I expect there will always be a place for it, as it gives important guarantees. Just like mainframes still exist (the article mentions this too - "different parts of even the same application naturally want to run on different kinds of cores"). Also, it may be that the free lunch is extended with graphene or other radically different semiconductor technology (except for quantum computing as it will also need a complete rethinking of software). Heterogeneous, parallel computing exists in addition to the sequential model and won't replace it. I do expect cases where parallelism matters to grow as AI (voice recognition, human language recognition, driverless cars, etc) becomes more prevalent.