11–20 of 49 posts
"Which is funny because that describes AI and you’d be doing this kind of work on a GPU which leans entirely into these advantages and not a CPU anyway" Damn thats harder to parse than it needed to be.
"Who cares? Produc" This one is even more hard to parse :)
Do I need exponential improvements and vector operations in a text editor though?
> most traditional software will be stuck in the past, missing out on the exponential improvements Do I need exponential improvements and vector operations in a text editor though?
The data does not support the premise much less the grandiose conclusions at the end of the article. By pure construction memory is always going to be faster than disk, right up to the point where disk is inplemented as memory which makes this a pointless semantic discussion. Such a fact would hardly invalidate the core pillars as computer science as the conclusions imply. Waste of time.
Yeah hope we are going back to days where developing software means one needs to understand the underling hardware. I know that makes the barrier of entry higher, IMHO that is a good thing. We don't need more people doing software development just quality people.
There's some sleight of hand being perpetrated here through the use of an inappropriate scale to trick the reader into thinking that NVMe latency is roughly zero when it's not. Let's just stipulate that you have an unreleased, hypothetical NVMe device with consistent 10µs read latency. The same device will have a write latency 10-100x higher, which it hides, under transient conditions, with DRAM. It's a very poor men…
The big problem is that it misses a lot of nuisance. If actually try to treat an SSD like ram and you randomly read and or write 4 bytes of data that isn't in a ram cache you will get performance measured in the kilobytes per second, so literally 1,000,000 x worse performance. The only way you get good SSD performance is reading or writing large enough sequential chunks.
Generally random read/write for a small number of bytes is similar cost to a large chunk. If you're constantly hammering an SSD for a long time, the performance numbers also tank, and if that happens your application which was already under load can stall in truly horrible ways.
This also ignores write endurance, any data that has a lifetime measured in say minutes should be in ram, otherwise you can kill an SSD pretty quick.
Last I checked, that wasn't how citations worked.
I only sampled one data point (2017 AMD EPYC Rome Clock rate) which was significantly off, because in 2017 it was the Naples chipset that was released, and, unless 2017 was desperate enough to clock from 2.2Ghz to 3Ghz on the regular (Boost up to 3.2Ghz), the 'research' was a fair bit off...
Doesn't undermine or contradict the authors (bots?) point, but a strange way to provide 'evidence' for an argument.