Re: A chip too far? Where is your solution Mr Larkin?
- From: Martin Brown <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:23:58 +0100
John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:07:51 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaonStpealmtje@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A chip too far? Where is your solution Mr Larkin?
http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/13/technology/microchips_copeland.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008081405
Blowing in the wind, all blowing in the wind.
1. A new programming language, accompanied with a new way of teaching
programming.
That might help a bit. But there are a lot of very important legacy applications already out there. Like it or not we are tied into the existing applications codebase.
2. A new OS, which uses a nanokernel approach and wastes processors in
the name of reliability.
Can't fault the idea of keeping the Ring0 protected kernel as small as possible, or giving users the least privileges needed to do their job. But wasting performance for reliablity though is never going to fly - not least because most times it would not have the desired effect.
Hardware enforced memory protection for threads on a timesliced CPU can be made every bit as reliable as giving each one a physical CPU just a SMOP.
3. Ultimately, a new multicore cpu architecture that exerts much more
hardware control over the things that programmers tend to screw up.
You mean like enforcing bounds checking on array and pointer access? I am all in favour of that, current CPUs have some of the right instructions but most production code has these safety nets optimised out in final build. Performance, whizzy graphics and even mythical faster benchmark figures sell kit - sadly reliablity doesn't(*).
(*) except for certain high availability mission or saftey critical kit.
The current generations of languages, programmers, methods, and OSs
are relics, and they don't scale.
If you don't remember your history you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Do you not remember the Transputer and its lovely little parallel processing language Occam. Scaled really well but they went bust - probably because they were manufacturing in the UK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
I might even be tempted to agree with you that the time is now right for someone to try this route again. I predict lots of fun and games for desktops with Vista and N>4 x86 compatible CPU cores.
It will take a long time to fix things, because the current computer
culture - academics, programmers, cpu makers, Microsoft - will fight
for its survival.
Academics are a lot more sanguine about things than you seem to think. Most that I know believe the market gets what the market deserves. If people will buy vacuous buggy software with a cute interface that crashes when the wind changes direction then manufacturers will oblige.
Regards,
Martin Brown
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
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