On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 06:50:28PM -0700, Roman Shaposhnik wrote: > > The mention that "... the overhead of cache coherence restricts the ability > > to scale up to even 80 cores" is also eye openeing. If we're at aprox 8 > > cores today, thats only 5 yrs away (if we double cores every > > 1.5 yrs).
Sharing the memory between processes is a stupid approach to multi-processing / multi-threading. Modern popular computer architecture and software design is fairly much uniformly stupid. > A couple of years ago we had a Plan9 summit @Google campus and Ken was > there. I still remember the question he asked me: what exactly would you make > all those core do on your desktop? It's easy to write good code that will take advantage of arbitrarily many processors to run faster / smoother, if you have a proper language for the task. With respect to Ken, Bill Gates said something along the lines of "who would need more than 640K?". There is a vast range of applications that cannot be managed in real time using existing single-core technology. Sam