[geeks] New Itanium machines from SGI

[Chris Byrne]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: geeks-bounces at sunhelp.org 
> [mailto:geeks-bounces at sunhelp.org] On Behalf Of Kurt Huhn
>
> 
> You mean we have to learn how to write good code?
> 
> *gasp*
> 

Yeah pretty much. Notice the trends in coding. When everyone was stuck
with a relatively low memory limit (either by poor design or by cost)
most prgrams were designed to have a low memory footprint. The less
expensive memory has become the larger that footprint is until today
where XP just sitting there doing nothing has 128 megs in use. Not that
its actually usig it, its just holding it there in case it needs to be
used.

And in the case of processing power its even worse. In the 80s game
designers were doing everything they could to squeeze the last bit out
of every processor cycle. Ever since the massive adoption of DirectX
however they've depended more and more on moores law, and the power of
the video card to do their work for them.

Oh and why arent we using our video cards spare processing power when
they arent being used for display processing? You would think it would
be relatively easy to write software and a driver that uses the onboard
geometry engines to do floating point work. Hell a GeForce ti4600 has
more processing power than my whole computer did three years ago. 

We've basically got a massive floating point calculation engine sitting
in every one of our systems. If you look at the high end cryptographic
accellerators and modern graphics cards a lot of what they do is very
similar. Why don't we use that power?

Same thing for the super high end sound cards. Why don't we use those
super fast DSP's for something.

But the most findamental problem is msot code is still deisgned to run
with a single thread or a small number of threads.Why? Because it's a
lot harder to write heavily threaded code with a lot of paralellism in
it. And it's a lot harder to design a compiler to deal with that code
efficiently. 

The whole point of the Itanium (and to a esser extent the P4, especially
with hyperthreading) is that its supposed to use highly paralellized
code and the compiler is supposed to make massive paralellization
optimizations at compile time. Only it doesn't work. Or at least it
doesn't work well yet. Its only been a few years, and they need a lot
more dev and debug time before its anything but a dog

Chris Byrme