Interview with Con Kolivas (APC)

Posted Jul 25, 2007 20:02 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Interview with Con Kolivas (APC) by russell
Parent article: Interview with Con Kolivas (APC)

*shrug*

Think of your processor as if it's a black hole.

Wafers are getting bigger and purer. Fab processes are getting faster and smaller. You just have SO MANY TRANSISTORS. They got so many that they are throwing 4 or more cores on a single die.

Intel has a research processor that has 80 cores on it.

WTF is any desktop going to do with 80 cores? Sure 2 cores is great, and 4 is pretty good. 8 is so-so, but your looking at 32 or 64 cores you simply are not going to see any improvement in performance! So what is happening is that all the functionality of your computer is just going to get sucked into that processor, piece by piece. Your video card, your wifi, your north bridge, your sound midi, your modem, etc etc etc.

It's cheaper, faster, more reliable, more energy efficient.

> They caught up because of specialized hardware, specifically 3DFX cards and sound cards

Physics acceleration? It's a joke.

Sound card acceleration? It's dead and dying, killed by it's own patents. You can blame Creative for that one. Wait till their patents dry up then you'll see real innovation in realistic 3D sound. It'll be all software, though.

3d Acceleration? The movement is torwards cpu cores of different types, specialized for specific workloads.

State of the art "hardware acceleration" graphics nowadays for video graphics is you take proprietary shader language and you compile it into to binaries to run on your GPU. Sounds familar? Doesn't sound like 'hardware acceleration' to me, it sounds more like regular old software on a special cpu.

If it wasn't for the fact that ATI and Nvidia were such A-holes about their 'IP' we would be compiling are software to run on both the CPU and on the GPU. GCC would decide which would be faster and you would be able to use that massive amounts of memory bandwidth for something actually useful.

ATI and Nvidia are heading towards GPGPU. Intel is heading towards media optimized x86-like cores. Either way it will be faster and be useful for so much more then current video cards are used for.

Hardware raid? Software raid is faster... eventually it will be better.

---------------------

Modern OSes are bloated, no doubt about that. But the solution isn't hardware.. the solution is fixing the OS.

The Linux kernel is already kick-ass. Sure it has issues, but it's still better then OS X's kernel or Window's kernel or Solaris's kernel. It's best there is for what it does well. If Linux devs can figure out solutions to the remaining driver issues and fix userspace-to-kernel ABI/API breakage issues then there will be almost no reason to use anything else.

For this I think embedded development is helping a lot. You can spend all day banging your head against the Linux kernel, but it won't compare to fixing some memory usage issues with GTK in terms of positive impact.

Projects like Maemo for the Nokia N800 or OpenMoko for Neo1973 were you have a nearly full Linux install with X, networking, GTK/Gnome, and Linux work well on a hand-held device is hugely positive. I think things like that are eventually going to help improve desktop performance considerably....

If Gnome can be made to run well on a phone with 128megs of ram, 64 megs worth of flash drive, and a 300mhz ARM cpu then it's going to kick ass on a modern desktop. This sort of thing is probably the most important thing right now, I think.

Hopefully KDE4 will be everything they promise it will be...

Interview with Con Kolivas (APC)

Posted Jul 26, 2007 9:28 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Um, what do you think hardware acceleration *is*? You're talking about software offloaded to a specialized coprocessor as if it weren't hardware acceleration, but of course it is: the coprocessor is often specialized to some degree, or has privileged access to hardware the CPU can't see and has nothing else to do so it can do things with harsh latency bounds.