<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Sep 17, 2010, at 7:39 AM, Hearns, John wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/17/hotzle_on_brawny_and_wimpy_cores">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/17/hotzle_on_brawny_and_wimpy_cores</a><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#144FAE"><br></font></font></div></blockquote><div><br></div>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:</div><div><br></div><div>1) He cites Amdahls' law, but leaves out Gustafson's.</div><div><br></div><div>2) Yeah, parallel programming is hard. Deal with it. It's helps me pay my bills.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>The whole letter just seems like it's full of non-sequiturs and just a general gripe about processor architectures.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>I think our own Doug Eadline has been beating the drum (or the alarm<br>bell) about multicore for some time also.<br><br>"may not be preferable to chips with faster but power-hungry cores"<br>Yeah - bring it on. Specialist computer rooms, flourinert cooling,<br>unusual word sizes, and the HPC expert kept in a windowless room full of used coffee mugs.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>:-)</div><div><br></div><div>Have a good weekend all,</div><div><br></div><div>-bill</div><div><br></div></div></body></html>