Re:Threads Are a Bad Idea for Most Purposes (1995) [pdf]
by Taniwha on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:02PM
(#22173987)
No, it didn't take a decade, that was just how long I did it for (before it got boring) - I just mean that you have to learn to think about parallelism in a different way, we train hardware engineers to do this but not software ones
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Re:Threads Are a Bad Idea for Most Purposes (1995) [pdf]
by pdimitar on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:12PM
(#22174068)
So it eventually got boring for you. So... threads are a bad mental model for our brains? :P
Not sure what you mean by your statement that hardware engineers are trained to think differently about it. I am not sure there's much overlap between HW and SW engineers in terms of parallelism modelling. Do you have a few examples?
Re:Threads Are a Bad Idea for Most Purposes (1995) [pdf]
by Taniwha on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @05:05PM
(#22174603)
No, chip making got boring - essentially it's a month a year of doing fun creative stuff and 11 months a year making sure that it makes timing and is perfect before you tape out. When you're coding on the other hand you can get something new working every day. I chose to go back to software.
However having said that I find myself designing silicon again, change is good for the brain I guess
Hardware people tend to think in terms of netlists and pipelining so they have to worry about parallism on every clock