On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 06:57, Mark Biggar wrote: > Martin D Kealey wrote: > > I want Perl to run 128 times faster on a 128 CPU machine... now I know > > that's not entirely realistic, but it should be able to run at least say > > 60 times faster. > > Amdahl's law applies here: "no amount of paralellism will speed up > an inheirently sequential algorithm"
True in the abstract, but in practice in most languages an awful lot of algorithms that I<aren't> inherently sequential get serialized by the compiler because it can't tell it's safe to do otherwise. This is where pure-functional or applicative languages can have a big performance win - because the compile almost alway I<can> see that things are safe to parallelize. -Martin
