Project COSA: How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis?

[her34]

This guy has interesting ideas but I'm not technical enough to comment on how valid they are. Your thoughts?

Project COSA overview
http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/COSA.htm

blogs:

How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis:
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-solve-parallel-programming.html

Tim Sweeney comments in this one:
Larrabee: Intel’s Hideous Heterogeneous Beast
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/08/larrabee-intels-hideous-heterogeneous.html

 

[CycloWizard]

I'm not an expert in this area by any means, nor have I kept up with Larrabee as much as I would have liked. That said, if Larrabee simply offers the possibility of utilizing a heterogeneous program model while still allowing a homogeneous one, then nothing is lost. If I have a hammer and a screwdriver in my toolbox, but I never use them both at the same time, is it a bad thing to have them both available?

 

[William Gaatjes]

I think the question is : Will it be easy for programmers new to heterogeneous processors to use it to it's full potential in a short time.

The one that can provide the hardware and software to allow programmers to use as much calculation power as possible will have a good head start.

It seems the hardware is to be found at Nvidia and especially AMD (x86 license advantage) . But the compiler writer is still Intel.

AMD has the biggest chance if they start to invest in a good compiler and lot's of programming examples and tutorials for programmers and business . They have the calculation power knowledge from AMD and ATI combined and an x86 license with the accompanying hardware design knowledge. If AMD play their cards right on the software side they might get that chance they need. If they play their cards wrong, Nvidia will catch up. As will Intel.


I myself think heterogeneous processors are the future.

 

[Modelworks]

I think the days of a general cpu to do lots of different task is coming to an end. Currently in the pc world we use the cpu to do functions like DSP when a dedicated DSP chip could do it 10x faster. I expect the future to be systems with a central processor that merely directs traffic to dedicated devices that then handle the code. Similar to the way graphics are now processes by the GPU I can see a day where there is also dedicated chips for things like DSP where the CPU is relegated to being a traffic cop.

Products like ARM can do DSP, JAVA, FLASH as quick as the fastest intel and not because it has a high clock speed, but because it has dedicated chips for those functions.

 

[CycloWizard]

I think the days of a general cpu to do lots of different task is coming to an end. Currently in the pc world we use the cpu to do functions like DSP when a dedicated DSP chip could do it 10x faster. I expect the future to be systems with a central processor that merely directs traffic to dedicated devices that then handle the code. Similar to the way graphics are now processes by the GPU I can see a day where there is also dedicated chips for things like DSP where the CPU is relegated to being a traffic cop.

Products like ARM can do DSP, JAVA, FLASH as quick as the fastest intel and not because it has a high clock speed, but because it has dedicated chips for those functions.

Perhaps Intel foresaw this as well and is trying to change the future by making their product more well rounded, at least for the interim?