Putting out the hardware dumpster fire

To me, the problem is one of monopoly and corporate thinking. When Intel and AMD make most of the chips, we end up with a Coke vs Pepsi mentality. There may be a hundred other hungry manufacturers, but without access to capital they'll never get enough traction to scale.

Around 2000, FPGAs were set to go mainstream and let us design CPUs of our own, but Xilinx chose to keep them proprietary so they never evolved. It's unfortunate that the company most capable of thwarting the status quo is the one propping it up. But they were trendsetters, that's how it's going with all things tech now.

Then Nvidia mostly monopolized the GPU industry and sent us down the SIMD rabbit hole. So we can process large vector buffers at great personal effort ..and that's about it.

What I and I think a lot of people probably want is a return to big dumb processors. Something like a large array of RISC-V cores with local memories connected via content-addressable memory and copy-on-write that presents a symmetric, unified address space that can be driven with traditional desktop programming languages. Had a CPU like this kept up with Moore's law, we would have had a 10 core machine in 2000, a 1,000 core machine around 2010 and a 100,000 core machine today, reaching between 1 million and 10 million cores by 2030. Which shows just how incredibly slow CPUs are vs what they could be.

The situation is so bad that I've all but given up on things ever improving. I mostly think about getting out of programming now and going back to living a normal life in the time I have left. Because the writing is on the wall: SIMD will deliver a narrowly conceived notion of neural network AI that's "good enough" and will stop all further evolution of CPUs. We'll miss out on the dozen or so other approaches like genetic algorithms and be forever separated from simple brute-force methods that "just work". The AI will soon be like Mrs. Davis and the vast majority of people will be face-down in their phones, then connected neurologically. The arrival of WALL-E and Idiocracy will coincide with the destruction of the natural world by 2100 and that will be that.

The argument really comes down to centralized control vs distributed resilience and freedom. It's pretty obvious which one we have right now, and that it's getting worse each year. Now I look on each headline with growing weariness, picking up on which mistakes will be doubled down on, which kool-aid they want us to drink this time. Because without the intervention of at least one successful internet lottery winner, or a concerted effort by thousands of hobbyists, there's simple no viable path from where we are now to where we could be, making the vast majority of the work we do a waste of time in the face of the potential we might have had.

It's hard to write anymore without sounding like a fringe lunatic projecting frustration on a world that is blissfully unaware that anything's even wrong. I'm probably wrong for doing so. Just another reason to probably get out of this business.

It's the lack of capability based security, and a common tragic misunderstanding of what it is, that is the root cause of this dumpster fire. This effects all operating systems in common use, including all versions of Linux, Mac OS, Windows, etc.

Imagine if your only choice to buy an ice cream cone was to give the other person full access to your checking account, forever. That's what phones do, and as a result, we've learned to call that a "capability"

Imagine taking out a $5 and handing it over to pay for that ice cream... the most you can lose, ever, is $5. That is what capability based security does. You interactively chose what side effects you'll allow (by picking bills out of your wallet), at the time of purchase.

For desktop apps, like an office suite, all you have to do to port code over is change the calls to file selection dialogs (which return a list of file names) to "powerbox" calls (which return handles), then use those handles instead of directly opening the files. The user doesn't see any difference in behavior, but they are now firmly in control of things, instead of your program.

When (not if) the kernel scheduler locks up while the fans are slow/stopped at the same moment some scheduled user process begins driving 250W+ through a CPU the isolated fan controller (not to mention isolated thermal throttling logic, also independent of the OS) has great value.

> If this doesn’t happen—why doesn’t it?

Hardware evolves faster than operating systems and has complex requirements of which operating systems are oblivious, and there is no world where device manufacturers and consumers will tolerate being gated on operating system evolution. These complications have to run somewhere so independent processing elements appear and grow. This pattern delivers ever crucial compatibility by hiding new complications from legacy operating system interfaces.

The only path I can imagine that would change this paradigm requires a.) greatly increasing the reliability and security of operating systems to the point where they can be trusted not to fail and damage hardware or corrupt things and b.) generalizing all known and future hardware and operating system interfaces such that hardware drivers (which, due to the more rapid evolution of hardware, do not enjoy the long term maintenance cycle of operating systems) can be highly portable, both across platforms and forward. Both of these requirements are "Hard" as in we have only begun to achieve this in primordial ways.

1) Return to office.

2) Why we need a dedicated CPU and DRAM attached to flash memory. You can garbage collect and wear level in your OS if you want to. Manufacturers say "no, we have a super secret secret sauce that nobody else could possibly improve upon". Uh huh, sure.