Intel's Haskell Concurrent Collections: on scaling to 32 and 48 cores | Hacker News Reader

Intel's Haskell Concurrent Collections: on scaling to 32 and 48 cores

software.intel.com

25 pointsdons6 comments

Intel must be quite concerned that it's latest chips, while just grand for web serving and other concurrent-but-primarily-isolated use cases, don't do much for my mom and dad compared to those of a couple years ago. So, I can see why they're putting so much effort into parallel computing research, open source, etc. But, the world has a long, long way to go before I can tell my dad that he would really benefit from an eight core processor. Maybe Intel has also concluded that the desktop computer as we know it is in the twilight of its existence in people's homes?

I don't play games, so I can't answer this question.... Do gamers benefit from eight cores? I think Photoshop does a reasonable job of parallelizing compute-intensive stuff, so the graphics crowd would benefit from an I7. CAD users, etc. of course. Is the PC soon to be a niche product?

A lot of vendors have been predicting that we are going to start having more virtual desktops, in the home, not just the office. All mom or dad would need is a monitor, keyboard, Internet connection, and a small box that never has to be upgraded. While in the backend you could be moved to different hardware in the middle of the day and not even know it. When this happens and people trust it, you pay 15$ a month for a "computer service," have a lower chance of failure, and improved features to make computing even easier for the general mass.

The personal computer would be a niche then. But, it is a niche now, isn't it? Tons of companies are using virtual desktops. (Not to mention that a "PC" at work isn't really a PC most of the time since you can't do whatever you want with it. Hence 'workstation' ?) How many more are using laptops? How many others only need to use their smartphone? iPad? Even just your TV?

A panel computer with an Atom processor running ChromeOS would be pretty close to the prediction, assuming that the OS upgraded itself, did not have/need local storage, shared profiles, etc. I don't think it can get much thinner in the US until bandwidth improves significantly.

Everything old is new again?

My high school ran on that well over a decade ago. I hope they have it right this time as it was pretty nasty back then. The biggest problem was when it broke none of the school IT staff could fix it so it would be down for a day or two while they waited on someone to come out and fix it.

They are concerned, but they have no choice. Heat production and the ever increasing cost for pipeline misses were killing them.

Of even more concern is that all of the major operating systems use SMP to scale, however scaling SMP becomes ever harder, and given Moore's law in just a few years a single chip will have more cores than SMP can comfortably handle. At that point we'll need a fundamental rethink of operating system design.

See http://www.bitmover.com/llnl/smp.pdf for more on that.

>while just grand for web serving and other concurrent-but-primarily-isolated use cases

Woah there.... Maybe 8 cores is fine, but suddenly 48 cores and you're Hashmaps for caching, your queues, everything starts getting funny. Believe me, progress needs to happen on the server side as well.

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