

The "high-level CPU" challenge - hhm
http://www.yosefk.com/blog/?p=20

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SirWart
I think he's got a point that Von Neumann machines get trashed a lot by people
who have no better alternative. After designing a processor in a senior level
computer architecture class, I think the Von Neumann machine really is the
best organization given your building blocks are binary logic gates. Also, a
lot of work has been done on instruction level parallelism, caches, and branch
prediction that keep the whole processor humming. Hardware is very expensive
to design and build, so it's economical to build to a general purpose and
widely used instruction set architecture and then optimize that as much as
possible. The next best thing is probably massively parallel architectures,
but the compilers and programming languages to support those are just not
there yet and there is so much code written sequentially. Perhaps when we have
some crazy new medium to build processors on (think analog neural nets or
quantum computers), a better architecture for those mediums will supplant Von
Neumann's.

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david927
I'm a bit shocked. Here's an industry-insider article upset about "trashing
Von Neumann machines when there's no alternative".

But pensioners who read the New York Times
(<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/technology/17chip.html>) know the problem
is that Von Neumann architecture is already dead. The CBE (the PS3 chip) has 8
cores, Tilera has 64, Intel is working on a 128 core chip, etc.

The question isn't, "Will vector processors prevail?", but, "What are we going
to do in the software industry to handle the fact that this is the future."

~~~
bayareaguy
Start making use of parallel programming libraries? More stuff like this I
suspect - <http://www.parallelpython.com>

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sigstoat
he could search the literature for existing material on the topic. you can,
for instance, read quite a bit about the architecture of the lisp machines.
searching google scholar for "tag coprocessor" comes immediately to mind as
producing some literature on the topic. i think work has also been done on
hardware support for generational garbage collection.

so, random challenge, promising big prizes, from someone who hasn't searched
the literature... crank.

