David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architectures and Languages

Post by calebh » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

bcheung wrote: post #94

It seems like hardware is moving away from RISC and even CISC architectures in favor of lots of different types of silicon for specialized applications (GPU, machine learning, vision, DSP, hashing, encryption, SIMD). It makes sense from a hardware perspective but it seems software development is not keeping pace. General purpose languages have trouble targeting this kind of hardware.

Post by tabtab » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 1:25 AM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #76

tabtab wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree: it's about weighing trade-offs, and calling software companies "lazy" is perhaps an oversimplification. However, I do believe the speed of light and size of atoms puts an upper limit on the degree you can keep throwing hardware at the problem. We may continue to find tricks such as quantum computing, but I suspect it will get ever tougher. There's a theoretical limit to how small you squeeze data a…

> We may continue to find tricks such as quantum computing Quantum computing does not magically speed up general purpose computing tasks. We only know a handful of algorithms where quantum computers provide algorithmic complexity reductions and even that that does not mean they necessarily calculate fast in terms of IPC, they just calculate previously intractable problems in reasonable timescales. TL;DR: you won't po…

Post by Senderman » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 1:28 AM UTC

solotronics wrote: post #81

Senderman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assembly typically requires you to declare your own alignments. There are some higher-level assemblers, with macros and things, but you're right, there's rarely an abstract language offering low-level memory specification. I also dislike the tendency to only expose the abstract view, although I think that trend is due to the difficulties involved in designing a language and compiler whose job is to output code for mu…

probably a dumb question but if you exposed the low level memory manipulation wouldn't you just end up with something like assembly?

Post by calebh » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 1:31 AM UTC

amckinlay wrote: post #71

I want a language where you can express time and constraints on time within the language and the type system. I want to be able to guarantee program correctness, pre-calculate fine-grained energy usage, optimize for energy/power-saving mode usage, interface with asynchronous signals, and whatnot -- all with respect to program execution at the ISA-level within some hard real-time constraints. Compilers make optimizati…

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 1:37 AM UTC

nickpeterson wrote: post #104

It's way easier to push the limits on simple things. We need languages with fewer features and clear design, running on hardware with less exotic features.