Re: Intel details future Larrabee graphics chip

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
.

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