Re: tlug: Karl-Max has cool dreams [was: dual-pentium processors]

[Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com>]

> These applications are not really a good argument in favour
> of the "common people's parallel computer", I'd say.

In fact they are. What do common people use computers for ?
Games, Web browsing, recording and playing movies etc. To put it
in a nutshell: any kind of multimedia stuff. All this stuff
is easy to paralellize. Not many people use computers for doing
mathematical computation.

> I agree, but even in the parallel programming community to
> many people are still dreaming of the Great Parallelizing
> Compiler. 

.....and they can dream forever of that......

> As I said, I completely agree.  Unfortunately, there is no
> `good' programming language that properly supports such a
> view yet.  (I don't say that there are no promising
> approaches, but all of these are at best research
> prototypes.) 

Actually VHDL isn't that bad and in general use, too. IMHO the
best starting point.

> Unfortunately, software parallelism is far more complex than 

Definitely not ! Actually, in that age of silicon compiling the
distinction between hardware and software is getting more and
more blurred. Today's hardware allows very complex designs, "on
the fly" reconfiguration already is peeping around the corner,
thus making the design of super complex hardware designs more
and more commonplace.

> hardware parallelism (the latter is bounded and in some
> sense you can exploit all logical parallelism with only

This is commonplace in software, too. Actually, it is the
governing principle underlying the architecture of UNIX.

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  But they called it                 karlmax@example.com
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