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Actually there's a fair bit of magic in the software as a result of exposing the hardware rather than trying to hide it. Once the software can know how long th
by msandford 13y ago
Actually there's a fair bit of magic in the software as a result of exposing the hardware rather than trying to hide it. Once the software can know how long things will take, suddenly it can do things that in x86 land would be magical.
This seems to me philosophically what Sony was trying to do with the Cell processor. Expose the hardware to programmers so that they can manage things better. The big difference being that the Mill was designed by a compiler writer rather than a bunch of guys who design GPU pipelines.
- chongli 13y agoActually there's a fair bit of magic in the software as a result of exposing the hardware rather than trying to hide it. Once the software can know how long things will take, suddenly it can do things that in x86 land would be magical. Ahhh. When I think of magic I think of stuff like optimizer heuristics that give incredible performance with very carefully written micro-benchmarks and abysmal performance in the worst case.
- msandford 13y agoYeah that makes perfect sense. I would probably refer to that as "cheating" rather than "magic" but I totally get the nomenclature mix-up.