On Sep 17, 2010, at 7:39 AM, Hearns, John wrote: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/17/hotzle_on_brawny_and_wimpy_cores
Interesting article (more of a letter really) - to be honest when I first scanned it I was not sure of what Holzle's actual argument was. To me, he omitted a lot of the details that makes this discussion much less black-and-white (and much more interesting) than he would contend: 1) He cites Amdahls' law, but leaves out Gustafson's. 2) Yeah, parallel programming is hard. Deal with it. It's helps me pay my bills. 3) While I am not a die hard FLOPS/Watt evangelist, he seems to completely ignore the power and cooling cost when discussing infrastructure costs. The whole letter just seems like it's full of non-sequiturs and just a general gripe about processor architectures. I think our own Doug Eadline has been beating the drum (or the alarm bell) about multicore for some time also. "may not be preferable to chips with faster but power-hungry cores" Yeah - bring it on. Specialist computer rooms, flourinert cooling, unusual word sizes, and the HPC expert kept in a windowless room full of used coffee mugs. Wow, now *that's* an image. On the other hand I can't help but wonder if you have just shown us the future of GPU-based computing. :-) Have a good weekend all, -bill
_______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
