31–40 of 67 posts
I believe a more plausible link exists between the end of Moore's law and the rise of open hardware as explained in this article:
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1321796
TL;DR
If eight year old hardware is almost as fast as today's hardware, there is ample time to reverse engineer competitive open hardware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compared to what? What does ordinary code mean? VLIW has been around for a while (Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example) and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code").
> Compared to what? A single core processor, of course. > What does ordinary code mean? Say, simple random sample of all the other code being run. > VLIW has been around for a while Yup. I never claimed otherwise. > Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example Yup. > and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code"). Yup. Still, yet again, over again, one more time, onc…
All VLIW does is move a lot of on-chip logic off-chip into the compiler. This only works for a small set of computing tasks - which is why the closest thing we have to VLIW today lives in GPUs. And why Itanium was nicknamed Itanic.
It's a non-starter for general computing because as soon as you start dealing with real-time conditions the compiler can't optimise in advance, the speed advantage turns into a speed penalty.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compared to what? What does ordinary code mean? VLIW has been around for a while (Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example) and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code").
> Compared to what? A single core processor, of course. > What does ordinary code mean? Say, simple random sample of all the other code being run. > VLIW has been around for a while Yup. I never claimed otherwise. > Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example Yup. > and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code"). Yup. Still, yet again, over again, one more time, onc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Compared to what? A single core processor, of course. > What does ordinary code mean? Say, simple random sample of all the other code being run. > VLIW has been around for a while Yup. I never claimed otherwise. > Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example Yup. > and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code"). Yup. Still, yet again, over again, one more time, onc…
Citing a paper from the mid 90s isn't a credible answer in 2016. All VLIW does is move a lot of on-chip logic off-chip into the compiler. This only works for a small set of computing tasks - which is why the closest thing we have to VLIW today lives in GPUs. And why Itanium was nicknamed Itanic. It's a non-starter for general computing because as soon as you start dealing with real-time conditions the compiler can't…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> do we have any ideas what the limits are on the algorithm side of things? I've always believed that humans do not have the ability to program things smarter than themself, because we do not understand our own intelligence, so we have no way to reproduce it. At the time, I said the only alternative I can think of is make random permutations and pick the best one, and go from there. But I said this as a ridiculous su…
(Totally self-promoting here) I did a lot of work along this line in my PhD -- stochastic architectures for probabilstic computation. http://ericjonas.com/pages/circuits.html There's an increasing amount of interest in this space.
(Well, that took more space than I wanted. I downloaded one of your circuits papers for a gander.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Compared to what? A single core processor, of course. > What does ordinary code mean? Say, simple random sample of all the other code being run. > VLIW has been around for a while Yup. I never claimed otherwise. > Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example Yup. > and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code"). Yup. Still, yet again, over again, one more time, onc…
Citing a paper from the mid 90s isn't a credible answer in 2016. All VLIW does is move a lot of on-chip logic off-chip into the compiler. This only works for a small set of computing tasks - which is why the closest thing we have to VLIW today lives in GPUs. And why Itanium was nicknamed Itanic. It's a non-starter for general computing because as soon as you start dealing with real-time conditions the compiler can't…
Yes, the compiler is involved. So what?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Compared to what? A single core processor, of course. > What does ordinary code mean? Say, simple random sample of all the other code being run. > VLIW has been around for a while Yup. I never claimed otherwise. > Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example Yup. > and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code"). Yup. Still, yet again, over again, one more time, onc…
Citing a paper from the mid 90s isn't a credible answer in 2016. All VLIW does is move a lot of on-chip logic off-chip into the compiler. This only works for a small set of computing tasks - which is why the closest thing we have to VLIW today lives in GPUs. And why Itanium was nicknamed Itanic. It's a non-starter for general computing because as soon as you start dealing with real-time conditions the compiler can't…
I think it's unfair to generalize from VLIW to everything published 20+ years ago. Plenty of the things discovered back then, or earlier, are still applicable and in production today. Your compiler picked most of its low hanging fruit ages ago. Lots of PhD theses are rehashing old ideas, often unknowingly. Results are results, what matters more is whether there's a relevant context, as you've highlighted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Compared to what? A single core processor, of course. > What does ordinary code mean? Say, simple random sample of all the other code being run. > VLIW has been around for a while Yup. I never claimed otherwise. > Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example Yup. > and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code"). Yup. Still, yet again, over again, one more time, onc…
VLIW is just a way of achieving instruction level parallelism. That 9:1 speed-up is vs a single issue, in-order core, which PCs haven't used since the mid-90s. Modern superscalar processors can not only handle multiple instructions in parallel, but extensions like AVX allow very wide instructions for embarrassingly parallel things like matrix operations. We've probably achieved 95% of the theoretical speedup from ama…
IIRC, the instruction traces didn't show 9:1 or anywhere near that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Compared to what? A single core processor, of course. > What does ordinary code mean? Say, simple random sample of all the other code being run. > VLIW has been around for a while Yup. I never claimed otherwise. > Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example Yup. > and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code"). Yup. Still, yet again, over again, one more time, onc…
Citing a paper from the mid 90s isn't a credible answer in 2016. All VLIW does is move a lot of on-chip logic off-chip into the compiler. This only works for a small set of computing tasks - which is why the closest thing we have to VLIW today lives in GPUs. And why Itanium was nicknamed Itanic. It's a non-starter for general computing because as soon as you start dealing with real-time conditions the compiler can't…
"Real time"? What?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compared to what? What does ordinary code mean? VLIW has been around for a while (Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example) and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code").
> Compared to what? A single core processor, of course. > What does ordinary code mean? Say, simple random sample of all the other code being run. > VLIW has been around for a while Yup. I never claimed otherwise. > Itanium is probably the most famous "general purpose" example Yup. > and has failed to gain traction outside of GPUs and DSP (ie not "ordinary code"). Yup. Still, yet again, over again, one more time, onc…