
OpenPiton – The Open Source Princeton Piton Processor - dbalan
http://parallel.princeton.edu/openpiton/
======
struct
I happened to bump into one of the people working on this a few weeks back,
the 1/2 billion cores per system aspect is very fascinating and because it's
SPARCv9, there's quite a lot of software that already works. It's definitely a
project I'll be watching closely.

------
reitzensteinm
I've got a naive, hopelessly optimistic view of Moore's Law. And I'll share it
here, because either it'll make you happy as a technologist, or you can laugh
at me and that can make you happy too.

1) The end of the free lunch of density/frequency scaling is forcing us to
pursue novel architectures to continue progress. If x86 were doubling in
performance every 18 months, would this project have ever been started? Even
the relatively benign trend towards GPGPU is a symptom of this.

2) These architectures are going to have us revisiting the way we write
software. Sufficiently Smart Compiler has long been a joke, but we're going to
see something pretty damn clever in the next few decades; taking a core
algorithm, written almost in pseudocode (to make as few assumptions as
possible about the underlying architecture), and optimizing it for different
architectures with wildly different performance constraints.

There's no use in building garbage collected or transactional memory, memory
with built in processors, runtime reconfigurable FPGAs, ridiculously NUMA
machines, inexact computing if we have to rewrite everything every time we
want to use them - the companies will go out of business first.

If this doesn't seem plausible - consider if you had to lead a team to write
such an SSC, or build a CPU that beats Skylake with the commercial constraints
that come with it (it has to be performant and bug free on a deadline), which
would you rather tackle? We're already performing ridiculous engineering
feats, but we set the bar lower in software.

3) Our current transistors are stone age compared to what is possible. We're
probably a lot closer to physical limits on an exponential scale than we were
when we were using vacuum tubes, but in 100 years we're not going to be
fabbing the same silicon transistors on a cheap, ultra mature process
technology, because they're good enough.

The combination of all 3 is going to yield computing power of unimaginable
comparison to what we have today, in our collective lifetimes. We're in a dark
place of stagnation now, but we're not done yet as an industry.

------
_delirium
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12350577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12350577)

------
Katydid
A more in-depth on what this is
[http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/inside-manycore-
resea...](http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/inside-manycore-research-
chip-power-future-clouds/)

