[Gllug] Duo Core processor 4Gb Ram laptop

[Tethys]

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Richard Jones writes:

>Ain't gonna happen ...

Agreed. Nor is it desireable, as far as I can see. There are a few
niche markets (HPC being one of them) that benefit from such things.
But for the rest of us, multi core and NUMA is probably more beneficial
anyway. A quick ps shows me to have 150 odd processes running on my
mostly idle machine, and multiple CPUs can certainly help there. Where
it won't help is with workloads that involve people running a single
bloated app like Word or Photoshop. There is certainly scope for those
apps to become better suited to large numbers of cores, but:

>the realization that our software isn't nearly parallel enough (and
>traditional solutions like threads don't scale).

Yep. Threads are a short term workaround to a problem, but some of us
have seen since the '90s that they were never going to scale as much
as was needed. I'm not sure where the solution lies for making our
apps more parallel, though. Even Erlang, which is famed for its
concurrency, only really works well by changing the way you think
about code, and spawning more processes than would be natural for
most people to express the problem at hand. I suspect that the best
direction might be a combination of improvements in autoparallelizing
compilers[1] and languages like Reia, which give you a language with
syntax that doesn't induce headaches on top of the Erlang virtual
machine.

Tet

[1] Yes, I know just how difficult it is, but I think we have little
    choice at this point. Realistically, I just can't see the world
    moving en masse to function programming languages any time soon,
    so we need to improve the state of imperative programming languages.
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