I wish I could set up a notification of some kind to know when someone gets Erlang/Elixir running on this chip. It would be a great platform for stress-testing Go concurrency as well.
Beyond that, I would really like to see Octave running on it because it's the only approachable vector programming language that I know of. The holy grail for me is to be able to use something like the MATLAB libraries at 1000 times their current speed to simulate the interesting stuff.
These aren't chips that you'd use to run your own application on (they aren't x86 or ARM or anything like that). They're custom ASICs engineered to handle extremely high amounts of network traffic.
You should instead look out for the 1024 core epiphany. It's a streaming processor so it may not perform as well on random memory access and there is no cache hierarchy but it's very close to your previous comment about "Something on the order of 256 or more 1 GHz MIPS, ARM, or even early PowerPC processors."
That's really cool, thank you! I would actually prefer a cacheless architecture like that because I don't think it really has a place in streaming or message-passing paradigms like Erlang or Go (it can still be relevant within the local address space of each process though, but I don't feel that the gain is worth it in most cases). Plus the problem space is still large so it might be better to let people discover alternative approaches to data locality like map reduce/sharding, copy on write and content-addressable memory.
I spent my teens writing blitters for shareware games and found that even then, the cache mostly got in the way. Processors like the PowerPC 603e had a pretty substantial cache miss penalty that was on the order of 5-20% for me depending on the situation. It was difficult to come up with appropriate cache hints for even relatively minor random access. I tried disabling the cache, but that made it even slower than a 601. So that's where my head is at, and the Epiphany sounds perfect. Here's a quick link for anyone curious:
well, even if they would, where are you going to get the associated 'stuff' (the board, the drivers, the operating system etc. etc.) around it to make it work ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244655
I wish I could set up a notification of some kind to know when someone gets Erlang/Elixir running on this chip. It would be a great platform for stress-testing Go concurrency as well.
Beyond that, I would really like to see Octave running on it because it's the only approachable vector programming language that I know of. The holy grail for me is to be able to use something like the MATLAB libraries at 1000 times their current speed to simulate the interesting stuff.