81–90 of 236 posts
Maybe it is time to rethink how computers are built? For example, that the kernel is running on a dedicated cpu, with dedicated cache and memory.
Friend of mine went to Hong Kong (from Europe) to work on exactly this: http://libresilicon.com/
Maybe it is time to rethink how computers are built? For example, that the kernel is running on a dedicated cpu, with dedicated cache and memory.
Today most software can only scale if you add a faster processor, that has to stop, before that happens, there is not much the processor manufacturer can do, their hands are tied IMO
Maybe it is time to rethink how computers are built? For example, that the kernel is running on a dedicated cpu, with dedicated cache and memory.
I agree, the single, superfast CPU model is outdated. It's a shame that multiprocessor programming is hard (or is it? It might also just be a vicious circle: 'not many people do MPP because the facilities suck because not many people do MPP').
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last decade I'm not so sure. I bought the very first readily available consumer quad core CPU a decade ago (the Q6600), two years ago I upgraded and I had to pay a huge premium because I wanted more than four (I got six!) cores. And that is just starting to change today. Not that core count is everything but consumer desktop CPUs have stagnated quite a bit. Here's to hoping AMD stirs it up a bit.
Because the compute power for consumer CPU nowadays is good enough, the effort has been in reducing energy consumption. But if you look at the server / workstation side, you can get 20+ cores in a single dice.
Nowadays the CPU is the bottle-neck even when surfing the web and using simple (electron) text editors.
The problem is less about openness itself and more about quality of auditing. Open isn't a magic bullet. As I understand, these latest CPU vulnerabilities were in the spec themselves. You could've found them by reading the manual. See what good that did us. But I posit that open projects do better with audits than closed because they are more likely to have open audits as well, and an open audit is harder to ignore o…
I'd pay good money for an open and simpler platform to run my security-critical tasks that don't require top performance. Auditing a modern high-end CPU is probably a huge task even if you have access to the HDL because of how complex they are. A simpler design (RISC, no out-of-order execution, basic branch prediction and prefetching...) ought to be fast enough with modern lithography to browse the web, send emails a…
China has Loongson also MIPS.
Maybe it is time to rethink how computers are built? For example, that the kernel is running on a dedicated cpu, with dedicated cache and memory.
Open does not mean better. This is not how our world works. Would be nice to have but I assume every Intel chip I can buy (even with the throtteling) will be more powerful and cheaper than any open processors. There is also much more than only architecture this thing (this works in software but not in hardware)... this would only work if a big player like AMD or Intel jumps on this ship (but it would be like giving a…
More powerful, probably. Cheaper? Ha ha ha! Intel has huge margins on its desktop processors. Until Ryzen they were basically a monopoly and set their prices to be very high. Look how much they dropped them after Ryzen. Risc-V is going to allow extremely cheap processors. They will probably not match Intel's single thread performance ever though.
The problem is less about openness itself and more about quality of auditing. Open isn't a magic bullet. As I understand, these latest CPU vulnerabilities were in the spec themselves. You could've found them by reading the manual. See what good that did us. But I posit that open projects do better with audits than closed because they are more likely to have open audits as well, and an open audit is harder to ignore o…
I'd pay good money for an open and simpler platform to run my security-critical tasks that don't require top performance. Auditing a modern high-end CPU is probably a huge task even if you have access to the HDL because of how complex they are. A simpler design (RISC, no out-of-order execution, basic branch prediction and prefetching...) ought to be fast enough with modern lithography to browse the web, send emails a…
And since it's ARM, it's at least half-open.
Cloud providers will be interested - slower cpu's = more money, plus selling the cloud as a more secure option to your data center.
And once you have a cpu that with a hardware switch can become more secure but slower, maybe there's a decent enough niche somewhere.