[Haskell-cafe] Multicode madness [was: Newbie question about tuples]

Andrew Coppin andrewcoppin at btinternet.com
Sun Jul 15 12:41:56 EDT 2007


Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> andrewcoppin:
>   
>>
>> I read somewhere that GHC's SMP support has been "tested up to 40 cores".
>>
>> Pray tell me, what the heck kind of machine has 40 cores? (And where can 
>> I buy mine from?? :-D LOL!)
>>     
>
> 40 cpus.
>
> It's a midrange Sun Fire server, something like this one
>
>     http://www.sun.com/servers/midrange/sunfire_e6900/index.xml
>
> You'll need more than spare change to get started though.
>   

o_O

*dies*

...which gets the question "where did *you* get one?!"

> *However* 8 core amd64 machines are practically commodity boxes now. Go
> get one.
>   

I'm currently sitting here typing on a 2-core AMD64 box. ;-)

However, it seems socket-939 is history now, so... Besides, all the 
benchmarks seem to say Intel's Core 2 Duo is the faster product. 
Currently. But then, if I could figure out how to use my GPU...



Not fantastically relevant, but... the makers of the Persistence of 
Vision Ray Tracer are currently working on a new multi-threaded beta. 
It's taken them *months*. AFAIK, it's written in C, and they had to 
spend forever removing global variables and whatnot. Huge internal 
restructuring to make it work properly.

I almost want to sit down and code something in Haskell and see how many 
times slower it is... ;-)

[The issue with that being 1. I can't figure out a really good set of 
abstractions, and 2. the type system hates me. Oh, and 3. it would have 
to save files in PPM format, because I can't figure out how to do 
bitmapped graphics or PNG writing in Haskell...]



More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list