Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 10:47:03 -0500 From: "Michael C . Wu" <keichii@iteration.net> To: Remy Nonnenmacher <remy@boostworks.com> Cc: keichii@iteration.net, ajh3@chmod.ath.cx, jgowdy@home.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: x86-64 Hammer and IA64 Itainium Message-ID: <20010427104703.G88522@peorth.iteration.net> In-Reply-To: <200104271108.f3RB81C63528@luxren2.boostworks.com>; from remy@boostworks.com on Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 01:10:21PM %2B0200 References: <20010426180836.C88522@peorth.iteration.net> <200104271108.f3RB81C63528@luxren2.boostworks.com>
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On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 01:10:21PM +0200, Remy Nonnenmacher scribbled: | On 26 Apr, Michael C . Wu wrote: | > On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 04:24:18PM +0200, Remy Nonnenmacher scribbled: | > | On 17 Apr, Andrew Hesford wrote: | > | > On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 12:49:04PM -0700, Jeremiah Gowdy wrote: | I do not doubt that IA64 will be a great think. by 'x86' I meant the | current Pentium architecture that embbed (and is slowed down by) tons of | gates just to handle old 8086 binary compatibility. IA64 do not need to. I can picture this feeding another generation of programmers all porting x86 software to IA-64........ | > | and a bunch of ARMs for low-level I/O tasks. Back to imagination. (Take | > | a look at 0.15um copper process FPGAs with embeded ARM at Altera, for | > | example, and you will see why no one, in the futur, will never ever need | > | a proprietary and undocumented 'server class' SCSI or network card). | > | > Please make Altera/Xilinx make their FPGA programming software | > freely available. | > | | I do not know about Xilinx but Altera does (to the extension that you | get stuck with their components). Even evaluation boards are getting | cheaper and cheaper. My point is that system software is getting close | to it's maximum efficiency with existing hardware. Each performance | step will require bigger and bigger rework of the whole code. In the | mean time, either we sit down and wait for better CPUs or hope that a | electronic design engineer read the code and start designing | really helpfull devices (remember: Digital is dead!), either we (as | software writers) start entering the programmable hardware world. .... You've just ruined any real reason for me to continue my education as a computer architecture student.... :P "Let all the computer scientists design the CPU and hope that they take into account the electromagnetic effects!!" | Take a look at device drivers in the kernel. You will find a lot of | pesting in the comments about this or that that require copying, | zeroing, duplicating, aligning, etc... All this resulting in CPU | correcting ill behaviors. | | Now imagine you get a fully programmable add-on card. If something get | wrong, the device driver writer can fix it and not just put hacks to | handle this or this revision of a chip. Even further, computation part | of the DD can be pushed onto the card. Imagine a NIC pushing you mbufs, | pcb entries, etc... You will also not have to wait for the good willing | of XYZ company to release documentation or seeing a version of a chip | being phased out in favor of the new super-one released only with an | opaque Windows driver. Can you picture the difficulty of writing drivers for these devices that do so many specific things? I am sure Bill Paul, Mike Smith, et al. will be so thrilled to read thousands of pages of documentation to write one driver..... Engineering is about K.I.S.S., not making it very complicated for everyone involved. | > | It would be really interesting to have a server-class FreeBSD SMPng | > | version and, in conjonction, an highly portable and small Pico-bsd like | > | one to animate the embeded processors. | > | > Please define "server-class" SMPng :) | | "An SMP version having a computational power curve as close as possible | of the Y=X line, where X is the number of processors" | | (Note that it is easier (to some limits) as the number of process | increases but is really difficult when not.) | | > You do realize that, in the embedded systems world, sometimes | > we use SMP, right? For example, multiple DSP ASIC's in the same | > router..... | | Hum... "Symetric" MP ? You sure ? ;). Yes, we use Symmetric MP in DSP applications like sonar signal processing. There is no reason that a core router at MAE-West cannot have SMP DSP chips doing any given single fiberoptic line. -- +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | keichii@iteration.net | keichii@freebsd.org | | http://iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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