Re: 1teraflops cell processor possible?

On Tue, 02 Dec 2003 02:34:26 -0500, Robert Myers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

>Sometime within the last year, Andy Glew raised the question on
>comp.arch of what was holding us back in the area of parallel
>computation.
>
>*No one* mentioned a lack of processing power.  The consensus was: a
>lack of solid, workable *software* tools.  That on a forum dedicated
>to hardware.

_I_ mentioned lack of processing power. I specifically said that as a
matter of empirical fact, for all the talk about the difficulty of
programming them, whenever people can get their hands on parallel
machines, they find good uses for them. I know I could happily make
use of a trillion-node machine if I could afford one.

>For all the bilge and bother of this thread, I'm left with a very
>basic question: can you get the energy performance out of a classical
>architecture that you can get out of a streaming architecture.  Two
>posters have stated without proof that they *know* that a streaming
>architecture won't beat a classical architecture on realistic code.  

I took them to be stating that if you have an algorithm that can take
advantage of a streaming architecture, it will also get a performance
boost on a classical architecture, so let's work on the algorithms
first, to make sure the streaming chips will be put to good use when
we build them. Which makes sense to me, and I'm still interested in
looking at what the difficulties are with doing this.

>I'm glad that they are possessed of such a profound and instantaneous
>grasp of all that is possible in computation.  I'm a little slower,
>and I think most of the rest of the world is, too, and I'd like to see
>a little more money go into questions like that

By all means.

>and a lot less into
>high Linpack scores.

This is where we part company. If we never spent resources on actually
_doing_ things with the technology of the day (however crude and
inefficient it may be compared to what's ultimately possible), and
always waited for an efficient solution, we'd still be banging the
rocks together while we waited for someone to come up with a clean,
efficient way of making bronze.

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