[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hardware

Jon Fairbairn jon.fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk
Sat Jun 2 06:26:36 EDT 2007


"Neil Davies" <semanticphilosopher at googlemail.com> writes:

> Bulat
> 
> That was done to death as well in the '80s - data flow architectures
> where the execution was data-availability driven. The issue becomes
> one of getting the most of the available silicon area. Unfortunately
> with very small amounts of computation per work unit you:
>    a) spend a lot of time/area making the matching decision - the what
> to do next
>    b) the basic sequential blocks of code are too small - can't
> efficiently pipeline
> 
> Locality is essential for performance. It is needed to hide all the
> (relatively large) latencies in fetching things.
> 
> If anyone wants to build the new style of functional programming
> execution hardware, it is those issues that need to be sorted.

Yes indeed, though a lot has changed (and a lot stayed the
same) in hardware since then.  There may be greater
possibilities for integrating garbage collection in the
memory, for example, and there's always the possibility that
someone will come up with a new and radically different way
of spreading a functional programme across multiple CPU
cores.

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk




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