Re:Pessimism about parallelism
by nickpsecurity on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @08:07PM
(#18766344)
"and the only promising path forward (at this time) is parallelism."
Don't forget the FPGA's, esp if bundled with CPU. They still partly work by parallelism but I think reconfigurable hardware deserves its own mention.
On the other side, high performance computing demands more computational power, and the only promising path forward (at this time) is parallelism. I'm not motivated by optimism, but by pragmatism.
As a sidenote, I don't understand this section:
> We look at computing for graphics, neural nets, signal processing, and Bitcoin mining, and we see a pattern: parallelizing algorithms work best on hardware that is (a) specifically designed to execute them, and (b) can’t do anything else!
The same hardware is used for all of these things, and it was only (arguably) designed specifically for graphics (and even there "specific" is not certain).