[Haskell-cafe] Specialized Computer Architecture - A Question

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 19/03/2013, at 9:31 AM, OWP wrote:

> If I may ask, I'm not quite sure what O(2^n) and O(1) are?

Check any data structures and algorithms textbook.

Reverting to the original topic, THIS is the age of specialised
machines.  A lot of the chips out there are not just a CPU but
a SoC (System on a Chip).  Start with the ARM1176JZF-S chip whose
manual I currently have open.
 - sorta kinda RISCish ARM instruction set processor
   + including SIMD DSP/graphics support
 - native hardware execution of (most) Java bytecodes
   (This is ARM's "Jazelle" extension.)
 - vector floating point co-processor
You can get other chips with ARM cores and a mix of
 - analogue<->digital converters, comparators, Flash controllers,
   Ethernet controllers, USB controllers, other interface
   controllers, hardware encryption (especially in ARM v8),
   more kinds of timers than you knew existed, hardware random
   number generation, 
You can even get ARM chips with on-board FPGAs.

Of course SoC systems are not limited to the ARM architecture.
SPARC T4 chips have "Crypto Instruction Accelerators … [that] …
enable high speed encryption for over a dozen industry standard
ciphers" "plus random number generation" and "high speed 10 GbE
networking directly on … the silicon" and two PCI Express controllers.
SPARC systems offered, and still do offer, special hardware support
for dynamic programming languages in which immediate integers have
tag 00 in the bottom 2 bits.  However, when they went 64-bit, they
didn't bother to extend that to 64-minus-2-bit integers.

And of course there are Intel and AMD chips with all sorts of extra
hardware support for all sorts of things.  Notably, people are
integrating GPUs onto the same chip as the CPU.  (Where are the APL
compilers that can take advantage of this?  It's the perfect
APLlication for the language!)

The key point is that cpu designers/vendors take existing workloads
of commercial significance and figure out how to optimise that.  If
a heavy-duty web server, or a high end gaming system, or a mobile
phone, &c could clearly benefit from some kind of acceleration,
someone will get it.  If Javascript had a common abstract instruction
set, there'd be hardware acceleration for that.

Haskell programs are not yet a workload of commercial significance.

Sadly.