Intel details future Larrabee graphics chip
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From: John Larkin on 8 Aug 2008 16:29 On Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:12:14 +0100, Martin Brown <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: >John Larkin wrote: >> >> So what do you think OS's will look like 10 years from now, when even >> home computers run on chips with 100's of cores? Still one gigantic >> VMS/Mach/NT descendent running on one CPU, thrashing and piping all >> over the place, doing everything, still vulnerable to viruses and >> application bugs, still mixing scheduling and virtual memory >> management and file systems and running PowerPoint with serial port >> interrupts? > >A lot of IO is concentrated by the bridge hardware these days. And >serial ports have had moderate to large FIFOs for about a decade. > >XP runs quite happily on my dual core. Vista runs less happily on my new >Toshiba portable and I will never recommend using it to anyone. > >> And those other cores stay idle unless you play a game? > >I can see a case for cores allocated to processes with highest demand >for resources, but I do not believe it makes any sense to have one >thread per core with a properly designed secure operating system. Umm, excuse me, what do those words mean, "properly designed secure operating system" ? That's what my wife asked me once when I was stupid enough to use the phrase "too much garlic." > >In exactly the same sense as you claim for your magical hardware >architecture a properly designed secure OS would be well secure. There's nothing magical about lots of cores. Everybody is doing it. > >I could be persuaded that Mickeysoft leave 'Doze vulnerable to avoid >putting the AV people out of business (that would be anti-competitive). As James says, don't assume malice when incompetance will do. >> >> Things will never change? We'll always use 1980's OS architectures? > >Sadly I suspect that might well be the case until some compelling reason >to change comes along. Do you not remember how long the delay was before >there were 32bit consumer grade OS's for the early 386 PCs? What may well happen is that, once hundred-core CPUs are out in the wild, some small group of Linix kernal jocks will spin a version that *can* have file systems, drivers, stacks, and apps assignable to various CPUs. Then it would just be a configuration thing to assign one cpu to run just the OS. That would be dynamite for server apps. Then Microsoft will scramble to catch up, as usual. John
From: Dirk Bruere at NeoPax on 8 Aug 2008 18:29 John Larkin wrote: > On Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:12:14 +0100, Martin Brown > <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: > >> John Larkin wrote: >>> So what do you think OS's will look like 10 years from now, when even >>> home computers run on chips with 100's of cores? Still one gigantic >>> VMS/Mach/NT descendent running on one CPU, thrashing and piping all >>> over the place, doing everything, still vulnerable to viruses and >>> application bugs, still mixing scheduling and virtual memory >>> management and file systems and running PowerPoint with serial port >>> interrupts? >> A lot of IO is concentrated by the bridge hardware these days. And >> serial ports have had moderate to large FIFOs for about a decade. >> >> XP runs quite happily on my dual core. Vista runs less happily on my new >> Toshiba portable and I will never recommend using it to anyone. >> >>> And those other cores stay idle unless you play a game? >> I can see a case for cores allocated to processes with highest demand >> for resources, but I do not believe it makes any sense to have one >> thread per core with a properly designed secure operating system. > > Umm, excuse me, what do those words mean, "properly designed secure > operating system" ? > > That's what my wife asked me once when I was stupid enough to use the > phrase "too much garlic." > > >> In exactly the same sense as you claim for your magical hardware >> architecture a properly designed secure OS would be well secure. > > There's nothing magical about lots of cores. Everybody is doing it. > > >> I could be persuaded that Mickeysoft leave 'Doze vulnerable to avoid >> putting the AV people out of business (that would be anti-competitive). > > > As James says, don't assume malice when incompetance will do. > > >>> Things will never change? We'll always use 1980's OS architectures? >> Sadly I suspect that might well be the case until some compelling reason >> to change comes along. Do you not remember how long the delay was before >> there were 32bit consumer grade OS's for the early 386 PCs? > > What may well happen is that, once hundred-core CPUs are out in the > wild, some small group of Linix kernal jocks will spin a version that > *can* have file systems, drivers, stacks, and apps assignable to > various CPUs. Then it would just be a configuration thing to assign > one cpu to run just the OS. That would be dynamite for server apps. > > Then Microsoft will scramble to catch up, as usual. The big bottleneck has always been inter-process and/or inter-processor communications. That has to be solved at a hardware level. Tightly coupling the cores is only good for a max of around 16-32 cores. Unless it's SIMD, which is relatively easy. -- Dirk http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff
From: JosephKK on 9 Aug 2008 11:53 On Tue, 05 Aug 2008 08:24:04 -0700, John Larkin <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: >On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 13:30:52 +0200, "Skybuck Flying" ><BloodyShame(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > >>As the number of cores goes up the watt requirements goes up too ? > >Not necessarily, if the technology progresses and the clock rates are >kept reasonable. And one can always throttle down the CPUs that aren't >busy. > >> >>Will we need a zillion watts of power soon ? >> >>Bye, >> Skybuck. >> > >I saw suggestions of something like 60 cores, 240 threads in the >reasonable future. > >This has got to affect OS design. > >John This won't bother *nix class OS's They have been scaled past 10 thousand cores already. Other OS are on their own.
From: JosephKK on 9 Aug 2008 11:58 On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 12:54:14 -0700, "Chris M. Thomasson" <no(a)spam.invalid> wrote: >"John Larkin" <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message >news:rtrg9458spr43ss941mq9p040b2lp6hbgg(a)4ax.com... >> On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 13:30:52 +0200, "Skybuck Flying" >> <BloodyShame(a)hotmail.com> wrote: >> >>>As the number of cores goes up the watt requirements goes up too ? >> >> Not necessarily, if the technology progresses and the clock rates are >> kept reasonable. And one can always throttle down the CPUs that aren't >> busy. >> >>> >>>Will we need a zillion watts of power soon ? >>> >>>Bye, >>> Skybuck. >>> >> >> I saw suggestions of something like 60 cores, 240 threads in the >> reasonable future. > >I can see it now... A mega-core GPU chip that can dedicate 1 core per-pixel. > >lol. > At that point you should integrate them directly into the display. Then you could get to get to giga core systems. > > > >> This has got to affect OS design. > >They need to completely rethink their multi-threaded synchronization >algorihtms. I have a feeling that efficient distributed non-blocking >algorihtms, which are comfortable running under a very weak cache coherency >model will be all the rage. Getting rid of atomic RMW or StoreLoad style >memory barriers is the first step. That reminds me of an article / paper i once read about Cache Only Memory Architecture (COMA). Only they did seem to be able to get it to work though.
From: JosephKK on 9 Aug 2008 12:02
On Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:57:23 -0700, John Larkin <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: >On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 12:54:14 -0700, "Chris M. Thomasson" ><no(a)spam.invalid> wrote: > >>"John Larkin" <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message >>news:rtrg9458spr43ss941mq9p040b2lp6hbgg(a)4ax.com... >>> On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 13:30:52 +0200, "Skybuck Flying" >>> <BloodyShame(a)hotmail.com> wrote: >>> >>>>As the number of cores goes up the watt requirements goes up too ? >>> >>> Not necessarily, if the technology progresses and the clock rates are >>> kept reasonable. And one can always throttle down the CPUs that aren't >>> busy. >>> >>>> >>>>Will we need a zillion watts of power soon ? >>>> >>>>Bye, >>>> Skybuck. >>>> >>> >>> I saw suggestions of something like 60 cores, 240 threads in the >>> reasonable future. >> >>I can see it now... A mega-core GPU chip that can dedicate 1 core per-pixel. >> >>lol. >> >> >> >> >>> This has got to affect OS design. >> >>They need to completely rethink their multi-threaded synchronization >>algorihtms. I have a feeling that efficient distributed non-blocking >>algorihtms, which are comfortable running under a very weak cache coherency >>model will be all the rage. Getting rid of atomic RMW or StoreLoad style >>memory barriers is the first step. > >Run one process per CPU. Run the OS kernal, and nothing else, on one >CPU. Never context switch. Never swap. Never crash. > >John OK. How do you deal with I/O devices, user input and hot swap? |