Re: a dozen cpu's on a chip

On 13 mei, 20:44, John Larkin
<jjlar...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2008 17:31:21 +0100, Martin Brown



<|||newspam...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 13 May 2008 08:32:28 -0700 (PDT), pantel...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

My XP, not doing much right now, claims to be running 31 processes.
Add in maybe another 30 device drivers, tcp/ip stacks, and file
managers, and it would keep a 64-core cpu mostly employed.

Yes, but would it run faster?

Since it wouldn't spend a lot of time context switching, and since it
wouldn't crash and require reboots, and since it wouldn't leak memory
and require reboots, and since it wouldn't trash virtual page files,
and since everything would keep running (as opposed to everything
pausing for 10 seconds now and then), yes, for me I'd come out ahead.

You really should investigate *why* your PCs are so unreliable rather
than blathering on about how the world would be all sweetness and light
if only Intel would make a 256 core CPU.

XP isn't bad, especially to people whose standards were lowered by '95
and '98. To people who used to run DEC timeshare systems, or who do
hard realtime stuff that may not have bugs, it's still pretty bad.

Blathering? Do you think that computer architectures are perfected,
and will never change? Do you think that all the multicore CPU's being
introduced will only be used to make things more complex and less
reliable? Sure, pile OS virtualization on top of a heap of the
gigabyte dogs we're running now, and use the extra cpu's to run
multiple threads of Adobe products.

On the whole, this newsgroup should be renamed
sci.electronics.tradition. It's practically impossible to get anyone
to riff on ideas; these guys mostly want to defend current and
comfortable practice. I shouldn't complain... I make a lot of money
taking business away from people who refuse to think.

I suppose I won't bother to post my BGA transformer idea. Thousands of
man-hours would be expended all over the world inventing reasons why
it wouldn't work.

John

John, it is not my turn, but anyways this is an open group.
I think you are being a bit unfair.
Many people here work on interesting things, some under NDA,
and they will not give away some new ideas for good reason I am sure.
And what is 'new' anyways.
I know you are the best asm programmer in Frisco, if not the whole US,
and for sure you will have little problem to solve this issue that is
bothering everybody
from MS to IBM to DARPA, and sure I would like to hear about your BGA
transformer.
Software genius is so rare however that I really know of one example.
Back in the TV hacker days, when they finally had figured out the
triple DES
at the basis of the then new digital system, everybody did that real
time triple DES in hardware.
Special chips, like made by TI, that came with NDA, did the thing fast
enough, sweating in heat.
We tried on a real PC to do it in software, but way to slow.
Then this Italian guy published some soft for the PC.
He said, basically: This is a serial bitstream.
I have a 32 bit processor, so I do each incoming packet bit by bit,
using bit 0 of the CPU registers.
with this I fill a buffer, then for the second operation do the first
packet in bit 0,
the second in bit 1, the third in bit 2, etc.. as all triple DES steps
are the same, now one
instruction per 32 packets, a 32 times speed up.
I have this code, I dunno who was this guy, when I started reading his
description I wondered..
'hey this could work', it does.
No need for FPGA.
Now what that guy did that is genius in my view.
It made software decode of encrypted DTV on normal PCs (1 GHz at that
time) very possible with
power to spare for the rest that was needed.

Over to you :-)
.

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