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I'm just a software guy, so my thoughts are probably painfully naive here. My understanding is that we're mostly talking about economics - eg: that there's no
by switchbak 1y ago
I'm just a software guy, so my thoughts are probably painfully naive here.
My understanding is that we're mostly talking about economics - eg: that there's no way a Java/Lisp CPU could ever compete with a general purpose CPU. That's what I thought was the reason for the Symbolics CPU decline vs general purpose chips.
It seems like some hardware co-processing go a long way for some purposes though? GC in particular seems like it would be amenable to some dedicated hardware.
These days we're seeing dedicated silicon for "AI" chips in newer processors. That's not a high level CPU as described in the article, but it does seem like we're moving away from purely general purpose CPUs into a more heterogeneous world of devoting more silicon for other important purposes.
- wmf 1y agoIf you want to build something that is used you can't ignore economics. But in this case I think high-level CPUs are worse even if you could put economics aside. GC in particular seems like it would be amenable to some dedicated hardware. Azul went through that incredible journey.
- bigfishrunning 1y agoThose "AI" chips generally just optimize around a vector-multiply, allowing more parallelism with less precision. This is almost a lower level processor then a general purpose CPU, and doesn't really map to the "string compare instruction" type of functionality that Yossi Kreinin describes in the essay.
- switchbak 1y agoYes, which is why I said “That's not a high level CPU as described in the article”. It was an aside.