On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 10:09:20PM -0300, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:

> I was at a talk where Intel was showing their new multicore direction
> and the guy kept repeating how the academic people really should be
> changing their courses to teach their students to deal with, for
> example, four cores. At the very end he showed an experimental 80 core
> chip and as he ended the talk and took questions he left that slide up.
> When it was my turn to ask, I pointed to the 80 core chip on the screen
> and asked if programming it was exactly the same as on a quad core. He
> said it was different, so I asked if it wouldn't be better investment to

Of course it's different; globally coherent memories don't scale
with fermionic computers in a relativistic universe. The latest
boondoggle in the let's-keep-investing-into-expensive-illusions
is transactional memory in the mainstream. I was hoping for AMD
to step forward with TSV-stacked memories in their APUs, but that's
probably not going to happen now that's they're fighting for
survivial. Will nVidia do it?

> teach the students to program the 80 core one instead? He said he didn't
> have an answer to that.

It's remarkable how few are using MPI in practice. A lot of code 
is being made multithread-proof, and for what? So that they'll have
to rewrite it for message-passing, again?
 

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