Predicting the future

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <1706.193.213.34.102.1146516990.squirrel at denise.vg.no>, "Anders Berg
" writes:

>just read this: http://www.blachford.info/computer/articles/bigcrunch1.html

I must admit that I find this entire "multi-everything" to be a bit,
all-right: very, overhyped these days.

Writing programs which scale to just 32 cores is incredibly hard,
unless we talk about something like CGI scripts in apache2 (and
even then it's not trivial.

At the bottom of it is the fact that Intel has promised to double
performance 18 months, at least until Moore croaks.

Having run up against the 4GHz Si/CMOS clock barrier, the only way out
is expanding number of cores.

But in reality, the silicon real-estate could be used much better if
you take a "whole system performance" view.

For instance: add hw-crypto (Intel/AMD doesn't dare do this, because
they would have to make sure CPU's don't get into Iraq, N.Korea etc
but VIA already did it.)

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